sommar@enea.UUCP (Erland Sommarskog) (08/22/87)
In a recent article srg@quick.UUCP (Spencer Garrett) writes: >I was told once (by a respected linguist, as I recall) that English and >Russian are the ONLY two languages written with unaccented alphabets. Jean-Francois Lamy stated something similar some days ago. In a private letter he admitted that this is true if you look at it from an ASCII point of view. Let me straighten you out about this confusion. Very few pairs of languages have a common alphabet. Thus, one langauge will probably appear "accented" from the point the of other. ("accented" here also including umlauts, extra letters, digraphs etc.). So of course, looking from English all other languages may appear accented. However, there are alphabets that are equal to English. As an example, I take my own, Swedish. Yes, we have A with dots and ring and O with dots, but they wouldn't cause any problem, if we would like to define a Swedish character standard code disregarding all other languages, just like ASCII. They are just three more letters at the end of the alphabet. Now, if we look at English from a Swedish point of a view, does English has any "accents"? Yes, they have W. W exists in Swedish to, but only in proper names and is co-sorted with V. If we had dominated the computer world like the English-speaking are, we would probably have hard to understand why you couldn't replace W with V or accept it having a code miles away from the others. (No, no ":-)" here. I'm completely serious.) The interesting point is here that quite many languages could have the simple 8-bit enumerate for representing and sorting characters. English can, Swedish can (if we forget W), but German and French can not. For the sake of completeness, we should add that both Swedish and English do use "e" with acute accent, mainly in French loan words. (E.g. "clich'e") In Swedish you can also find in names with U with dots, being co-sorted with Y. Newsgroup note: I have inluded both sci.lang and comp.std.internat for sci.lang people that do not the other group. I have, howvere, only comp.std.internat in the follow-up line, since I feel that the discussion belongs more to this group than sci.lang. -- Erland Sommarskog ENEA Data, Stockholm sommar@enea.UUCP