Such an incident occurred in the past which have resulted with two deaths (one homicide -a woman stab to death by his husband and one suicide -which is the husband killed himself in prison later- ).

Cause: Just miss-printed SMS text by the hardware first(turns letter “dotless-i” to a regular english “i”) than a woman who miss-interpreted message as a serious insult against her and her family’s honor in the heat of ongoing argument with his husband… which leads a dispute resulting to woman’s family attacks the husband and stabbing him in the chest with knife… Than wounded husband manages to seize the knife and stab his wife, render her to severely wounded and eventually die at the hospital later.

The SMS message which the husband sent with his proper turkish char-set supported phone was…
“s?k???nca konuyu de?i?tiriyorsun”
with proper “dottlessi-i” in the word “s?k???nca”; meaning “you change the topic when you cornered”

The SMS message which the wife received with her sub-par phone which miss interpret or print dotless-i’s as a regular english “i”s giving the words whole lot different meaning…
“s*kisinca konuyu degistiriyorsun” meaning “you change the topic when you f**ked [with someone else]”

The original turkish news link is (http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/8748359.asp?top=1).
PS: I’ve try to translate the page with google-translate (to english) first… but ended up rolling-on-the-floor-laughing. I wonder when the google-translate stop translating Turkish to gibberish (or vice versa)

When the European i is borrowed, Turkish users case it according to the Latin rules: i->I.

My only suggestion is for Turks to remove ? and i from the keyboards, and just use the pipe character

Why don’t people use the Collator class?!?

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/text/Collator.html

“The Collator class performs locale-sensitive String comparison. You use this class to build searching and sorting routines for natural language text.”

Prozac for lovers. The…

Also, hexagonal French is moving back toward preserving accents in uppercase letters. They were basically dropped just to accommodate typewriters, which didn’t have enough keys to provide them.

This problem also illustrates the uneasy issue of when two symbols are regarded as the “same” in Unicode. For example, the Cyrillic capital letter es (U+0421) looks like (is a homoglyph of) the Latin capital letter c (U+0043) but the two are, quite reasonably, regarded as different. Given the distinction between the dotted and undotted letter i in Turkish maybe even the dotted lower case form and the undotted upper case form should have been regarded as distinct from their Latin homoglyphs. Of course, it’s difficult to know where to draw the line – an English letter a is presumably the “same” as a French one, isn’t it? However, different case conversion rules seem to me to be enough to trigger a separation. Except then, of course, we need to worry whether accented lower case letters in Canadian French are different from those in European French. Hmm, not easy. Now off to read RFCs 3490, 3491 and 3492 on IDNs to see what all that fuss is about.

Warning: Don’t use this method when your default locale is Turkey.

The JavaDoc for compareToIgnoreCase() says:

This method returns an integer whose sign is that of calling compareTo with normalized versions of the strings where case differences have been eliminated by calling Character.toLowerCase(Character.toUpperCase(character)) on each character.

Assuming the algorithm is implemented as specified, (and a quick peek at the source code shows it is, at least in the version of Sun’s JDK I have handy) it would have the same issue.