[net.nlang] Tyranny of the computer

matt@brl-tgr.ARPA (Matthew Rosenblatt ) (08/12/85)

> Diacritical marks, contracted letters, and special characters are
> not a sign of cultural identity -- they are annoying leftovers from
> a time in which people used to do most of their writing with a pen
> (or a brush, on the other side of the world). Let's hope they'll
> soon get out of fashion!
> 
> 						Thomas.

First, the traditional abbreviations for the American States had to go,
because they had a variable number of characters.  So now we live with
MA, CA, and DE instead of Mass., Cal., and Del.  But that's not enough
for the data processors!  Take the Roman alphabet, with EXACTLY those
additions (e.g., j and w) that Modern English had at the time speakers
of Modern English invented computer data processing.  AND THAT'S WHAT
YOUR LANGUAGE HAD BETTER USE, BUDDY!  No more cedilles for you Frenchmen
-- make that "Fransais."  No more tildes for you Spaniards.  No more
fadas for you Irishmen.  And you Scandinavians had better get into line,
too.

I don't believe that natural language, written or spoken, should serve
the needs of data processing.  Rather, how about the following deal:
We natural language users won't tell you data processors how to write
your FORTRAN or Extended Mercury Autocode.  You don't tell us how to
write our native languages.

				-- Matt Rosenblatt

dave@uwvax.UUCP (Dave Cohrs) (08/16/85)

You will probably be happy to know that one manufacturer, DEC, has the
ability to use all of these wonderful European characters on it's newer
keyboards (that usually useless 'Symbol' key on the VT202's or whatever
they're called) which actually work on the Rainbow and print on DEC
dot-matrix printers.  They also have these characters in their fonts
for the LN01/LN01S.  DEC also has some sort of 'international' character
set whose lower 128 characters are the standard ASCII characters, while
the next 128 are a number of useful mathematical symbols and European
characters.

Also, the Xerox 8000's running STAR also have Spanish, German and (I
think) French characters available.  I know, I've written papers using
them!

-- 
Dave Cohrs
(608) 262-1204
...!{harvard,ihnp4,seismo,topaz}!uwvax!dave
dave@wisc-romano.arpa

peter@baylor.UUCP (Peter da Silva) (08/17/85)

> I don't believe that natural language, written or spoken, should serve
> the needs of data processing.  Rather, how about the following deal:
> We natural language users won't tell you data processors how to write
> your FORTRAN or Extended Mercury Autocode.  You don't tell us how to
> write our native languages.
> 
> 				-- Matt Rosenblatt

Gee, I thought you natural language users were just telling us how to write
our 'C' programs. Must have been an illusion.
-- 
	Peter da Silva (the mad Australian werewolf)
		UUCP: ...!shell!neuro1!{hyd-ptd,baylor,datafac}!peter
		MCI: PDASILVA; CIS: 70216,1076

henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (08/21/85)

Note that there is an ANSI/ISO/etc. 8-bit-character-code standard in the
works, well advanced in fact.  This is intended to include most of the
European special alphabetics, I believe.  Dec may well be anticipating it
a bit with their new terminals.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry