Ian Frazier visits a typewriter wizard (Atlantic Monthly, 1997). Martin Tytell has stories to tell about converting typewriters for other alphabets:
There he received his hardest job of the war – a rush request to convert typewriters to twenty-one different languages of Asia and the South Pacific. . . . The implications of the work and its difficulty brought him to near collapse, but he completed it with only one mistake: on the Burmese typewriter he put a letter on upside down. Years later, after he had discovered his error, he told the language professor he had worked with that he would fix that letter on the professor’s Burmese typewriter. The professor said not to bother; in the intervening years, as a result of typewriters copied from Martin’s original, that upside-down letter had been accepted in Burma as proper typewriter style.
(Link found at Jonathan Borwein’s Quotations Page, which is mostly about the sciences)
I wonder which word. If someone knows the specific word, pls let us know.