A bad romance gets worse over mobile phone

The non-Latin letters that are in some languages have much significance. In this case, a substitution of a closed Turkish i with Latin i in an SMS was deadly. Who would have thought that a misspelled text message could cause such harm?

"The surreal mistake happened because Ramazan's sent a message and Emine's cellphone didn't have an specific character from the Turkish alphabet: the letter "ı" or closed i. While "i" is available in all phones in Turkey—where this happened—the closed i apparently doesn't exist in most of the terminals in that country.

"The use of "i" resulted in an SMS with a completely twisted meaning: instead of writing the word "sıkısınca" it looked like he wrote "sikisince." Ramazan wanted to write "You change the topic every time you run out of arguments" (sounds familiar enough) but what Emine read was, "You change the topic every time they are fucking you" (sounds familiar too.)"

From an email list at work: Localization Problems: A Cellphone's Missing Dot Kills Two People, Puts Three More in Jail