tmb@talcott.UUCP (Thomas M. Breuel) (08/14/85)
[in reply to a letter by sommar@enea.UUCP, in which he argues that the problems connected with national letters and diacritical marks are problems with computers rather than of the language] Aside from that you learned in school that 'oA', '"A' and '"O' *are* letters, what is the necessity for their existence? Why do they need a separate slot in the dictionary? If they are anything like the German umlaute, you could easily replace them with 'Oa', 'Ae', and 'Oe', for example (if those letter combinations are not used in your language). Let me give you an example of what I would consider a valid *reason* for keeping a national character set: the Japanese very seriously considered Romanisation of their written language. They ultimately decided against it. Japanese is too rich in homophones (due to borrowing words from Chinese and dropping the tones) to represent it adequately in writing with a purely phonetic system. The advantage of having an internationally 'compatible' writing system did not outweigh the advantage of being able to distinguish homophones in the written language. If you can't come up with a very good linguistic reason for keeping your specific national characters, I think you should re-consider your position: most computers happen to be made in America, most typewriters do not have *your* national character set, programming languages use those codes that you are using for national characters for punctuation, and most people neither know nor care about your special way of arranging words in a dictionary or how to write your national characters. The full 'English' alphabet happens to be known to all users of the Roman writing system, and it happens to be the common subset of characters on typewriters and computers. And it is perfectly usable for the phonetic representation of languages as rich in sounds as English, German, or Chinese. I sincerely doubt that *your* language is phonetically so much more complex than these that you could not represent it easily (and in fact without any serious changes to your current use of the Roman writing system) with 26 letters and a handful of letter-combinations (like the German 'ch', 'sch', &c), and I am not aware of any Germanic language so rich in homophones that the introduction of special characters to distiguish them is warranted. Thomas.
cjdb@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP (Charles Blair) (08/17/85)
> If you can't come up with a very good linguistic reason for > keeping your specific national characters, I think you > should re-consider your position . . . > . . . The full 'English' alphabet happens to be > known to all users of the Roman writing system, and it happens > to be the common subset of characters on typewriters and > computers. And it is perfectly usable for the phonetic representation > of languages as rich in sounds as English, German, or Chinese. > I sincerely doubt that *your* language is phonetically so much > more complex than these that you could not represent it easily > (and in fact without any serious changes to your current use > of the Roman writing system) with 26 letters and a handful > of letter-combinations (like the German 'ch', 'sch', &c) . . . Since these remarks could be taken either as insensitive or as chauvinistic, let me hasten to point out that the "English" alphabet is not perfectly suited for the writing of English itself. The phoneme represented by "ng" in the common suffix "-ing" has a separate symbol in IPA--the pronunciation of "ng" as if two different phonemes were involved, which one sometimes hears, is not a standard pronunciation, neither is the dropping of the final "g" (as in "keep on truckin' !"). As far as the vowels are concerned, forget it. A recent book on phonetics lists 14 "pure" vowels in English--far greater than the available number of vowel-signs.
mmar@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP (Mitchell Marks) (08/18/85)
My my, what's the problem here. Some of our Scandinavian friends expressed
the modest wish (probably the forlorn hope) that display devices and
character sets could handle their national alphabets a little better
(including order). Thomas Breuel replied, essentially, that these folks are
asking for too much, they ought to be able to get by with the standard
26 used in English, no diacritics or additional characters. Charles Blair
here at U.Chicago has a followup in defense of Breuel (not that we've seen
any complaints against him come through here yet), on grounds that don't
seem to me very relevant. The comparison with the Japanese romanisation
question has some general or distant relevance, but it doesn't bear at
all directly on this particular question. Nor do Blair's phonological
comments. It's true, of course, that the alphabet we use doesn't provide
a one-one mapping for the sounds of English. Ja...und?? The wish expressed
by the Scandinavians was not for a writing system that would allow for
phonemic spelling of their languages, it was rather just that they would
like to be able to use on their computers the written alphabets they
already have.
C'mon, fellas. Don't you think it's a little heavy handed to argue
that our alphabet should prevail because much computer development took
place in an English-speaking (rahter, -writing) context? Try the shoe on the
other foot. What if the standards had come from a country that doesn't use
`W'? Now the Americans come along and say Isn't there some way you guys
could please fit in `W', just for us to use here? And the answer comes:
well you don't really need it, just use 'U'. Or else: okay, we'll put
it in for you in place of some punctuation, at the end of the collation
sequence (or somewhere in the 8-bit set). Meanwhile all our phone books
and dictionaries still have it between `V' and `X', so either we have to
accept that computer-generated lists will have W-words in the wrong place
or we have to include a wasteful kludge in every sorting routine to put
the W-words back in the right place.
In any case, even if you're not convinced of their need for some
adjustment, what's your objection? Nobody wants to take away our ASCII
for domestic consumption.
--
-- Mitch Marks @ UChicago
...ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!mmarthomas@utah-gr.UUCP (Spencer W. Thomas) (08/19/85)
<*****flame on*****> What a chauvinistic diatribe! You might as well support removing the letter 'W' from the "English" alphabet since many languages don't have the sound and you can just as well use "ou" or a similar combination to represent the sound. In article <487@talcott.UUCP> tmb@talcott.UUCP (Thomas M. Breuel) writes: >If you can't come up with a very good linguistic reason for >keeping your specific national characters, I think you >should re-consider your position: most computers happen to >be made in America, most typewriters do not have *your* national >character set, programming languages use those codes that >you are using for national characters for punctuation, and >most people neither know nor care about your special way >of arranging words in a dictionary or how to write your >national characters. <*****flame off (but I'm still burning)*****> -- =Spencer ({ihnp4,decvax}!utah-cs!thomas, thomas@utah-cs.ARPA) "To feel at home, stay at home. A foreign country is not designed to make [one] comfortable. It's designed to make its own people comfortable." Clifton Fadiman
dave@uwvax.UUCP (Dave Cohrs) (08/21/85)
I think that the less red-necked among us will admit that English (or
American English) is not spoken or written everywhere, and the other
80% of the world isn't about to change their languages to accomodate,
right? Well, Europeans are really good at coming up with alternate
standards. Is any work being done in Europe to create a character
set that will make most everyone in Europe happy? There are 128
unused slots in the ASCII character set -- I don't see why an ESCII
set couldn't just put the necessary characters in between the equivalent
characters in the ASCII set (the spanish 'll' could be fun though,
remember, that's one letter).
I don't know the specifics on Northern European languages, but if
the letter 'A' remains the first letter and 'Z' the last, well-written
programs should still run with this new character set with nothing
worse than re-compilation.
--
Dave Cohrs
(608) 262-1204
...!{harvard,ihnp4,seismo,topaz}!uwvax!dave
dave@wisc-romano.arpawarack@aero.ARPA (Chris Warack) (08/22/85)
nk it's a little heavy handed to argue >that our alphabet should prevail because much computer development took >place in an English-speaking (rahter, -writing) context? Try the shoe on the >other foot. What if the standards had come from a country that doesn't use >`W'? Now the Americans come along and say Isn't there some way you guys >could please fit in `W', just for us to use here? And the answer comes: >well you don't really need it, just use 'U'. [...] One of the 'features' of the Macintosh [the computer for the rest of us] is that the keyboard, time format, theoretically anything, can be modified when the thing's turned on to fit any country's needs in a satisfactory manner... How well it succeeds, I don't know. I do know that it is used in France, in French. I have also seen Japanese fonts for the Mac but this is a long way from being 'Japanese-friendly.' Anyways, at least someone is taking a step to adapt. Note that this 'feature' is available on EVERY Mac, even those in the US. Also noticed that I directed follow-up to net.micro.mac. Chris -- _______ |/-----\| Chris Warack (213) 648-6617 ||hello|| || || warack@aerospace.ARPA |-------| warack@aero.UUCP |@ ___ | seismo!harvard!talcott!panda!genrad!decvax!ittatc!dcdwest! |_______| sdcsvax!sdcrdcf!trwrb!trwrba!aero!warack || || \ Aerospace Corporation, M1-117, El Segundo, CA 90245 ^^^ ^^^ `---------(|=