pom@under..ARPA (Peter O. Mikes) (08/13/87)
To :comp.std.internat Re : What is a character and waht is the 'path' ? | sommar@enea.UUCP(Erland Sommarskog) | ENEA DATA Svenska AB, Sweden writes: |The standard is an attempt to satisfy the requirements for the |different languages by assigning each combination an integer |value. But isn't a character a more complicated data type |than just a simple enumeration type? |In some languages the |combination may constitute a new letter ("a" with ring and dots, |"o" with dots in Swedish), in other you can apply accents and |other signs without affecting the sorting. (E.g. French, Italian) | I think that the simple representation for characters is completely |due the dominating position of the English language in the computer |world. |The conclusion is that a more sophisticated approach muct be taken. |However, I must admit that I do not have any bright proposals right |now, yet think of it!-- Absolutely. I want to second this correct observation and add a bit. One feature, which I have never seen on US printers/typewriters are keys which do not move the carriage - in particular, all those umlaut and accents (diacritic signs) which have this feature can then be added without back-spacing (thats important in manual typing only, but it does makes a difference there). Feature like that should not be difficult to make programmable (as macros) - and opens a whole new word of the EASY made overstrike characters. The daisy printer manufactures did actually discovered overstrikes, under the name Extended Character Set Printwheel about five years ago. However, it was applied mostly to mathematical symbols and not really fully exploited. If we really want be creative about this ... Well, try this one: the proper approach to Chinese ideographs is not to regard them as characters, but rather as 2-D words - made of 'strokes'. The strokes correspond to our (latin letter) characters and while the latin letters just go in a boring sequence, the Chinese 'words' allow overstrikes in several vertical positions. Mathematicians actually are doing similar thing (write formulas several lines high ) and it indeed helps to convey the meaning (compare the formulas typed or set by .EQN to properly typeset ones). The languages which use these diacritic signs are sort of in the middle of generality ( of the character ordering ) and I (for one) believe that English can greatly benefit by picking some ideas from European languages: I am referring to G.B.Shaw's complaint concerning the fact that English is not phonetic ( the written from does not determines the sound). There are strong reasons for that, and I am not suggesting that we should write 'najshn' instead of 'nation', but I do think that we can still write 'pool' and 'door' and use the diacritical overstrikes to show that one oo sounds as u' (long u) and other oo like o' (long o). Quite a few languages actually use those signs to determine the sounds uniquely ( some (e.g. Russian,) use it for emphasis (i.e. laudness ) some (French, German) to define the open-close pronounciation and some (in particular Slavic languages which use latin alphabet) use the signs to derive soft sounds ( e.g c^ becomes what english calls ch, s^ sounds is sh etc { except that the ^ should be inverted and ABOVE the letter - not next to it. There is no way how I can do that on this ASCII machine!} One literary use, which such flexibility of graphic images allows is rendering of dialects and accents, which is far superior to what English can do (by changing the spelling ( e.g. the 'tze' for German pronounciation of 'the' ?!% ).. Anyway, I will end here, by reminding folks that Shaw actually left lot of money for 'acceptable phonetisation of English' in his will, and that the non-native speakers of English should NOT wait for Americans to be innovative (just as Americans did not waited for Britons) and improve the english. After all, there will soon be more non-native speakers than natives, and what better forum than ISO there is, to explain that to native ^ ` ^ - ~ " ^ English speakers - what the English of the future may look like ?