<i>I can't even imagine what would happen for completely different scripts like Indian.</i><p>As far as I know, Ge'ez (for Ethiopian languages) sets the record with 70+ encodings [1] which took all sorts of different approaches.<p>The Unicode design process worked out quite happily for Latin and Cyrillic alphabet users because<p>1. There was widespread agreement about what is the smallest indivisible unit of the script (thanks to long history of literacy education, decades of typewriter usage, etc.). No one suggested <i>brilliant</i> schemes like encoding "O" as "C" plus a right-concave combining mark ")" or I as "T" plus an underline, for example.<p>2. Among the hundreds of millions of users of those scripts, there were enough countries which had a reasonable history not just of typewriter usage but also of computer usage, enough time for them to develop various competing encodings whose mistakes Unicode could learn from<p>Inner Mongolian script pretty much presented the worst-case scenario compared to the above criteria:<p>1. The actual users of the script were a small and poor population with high illiteracy rates and not many computer users; and unlike e.g. Cambodians or Ethiopians, they had no big diaspora population of refugees living in the US or other high-tech countries either (hence no one fluent in English to advocate for them and point out problems in the proposed encodings).<p>2. As a result of #1, disproportionate amount of discussion surrounding the encoding was generated by scholars whose main aim was digitising quirky classical texts, not everyday people who wanted to write everyday things without the computer making them think of extraneous details they don't think of when they're writing by hand.<p>3. These scholars can't even agree what is the basic unit of the script (in Russian grad schools, they teach it as an alphabet; in Japanese grad schools, they teach it as a syllabary)<p>[1] <a href="http://www.punchdown.org/rvb/papers/EriPaper3C.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.punchdown.org/rvb/papers/EriPaper3C.html</a>