50% Spanish or German, 50% Chinese

[Steven Schaufele]

Dear Rich & IE-list subscribers:

At the risk of beating an undead horse, i would very much like it
reiterated that not all of us have software capable of recognizing the
means by which some lucky subscribers' software can encode diacritics
and other expanded character sets.  And worse, some of us have software
that recognizes such codes, but interprets them quite differently from
the way they are intended.

For instance, the software we have here at SCU automatically converts
all such codes into representations of various Chinese characters.  The
result is that i have recently received many postings including extended
and richly-exemplified discussions of Spanish vocabulary, and most of
the words in question have been printed half in Spanish and half in
Chinese, to the point that i have been unable to make any sense out of
the posting at all, and have regretfully decided i must automatically
dump & ignore the whole discussion.

I've recently begun noticing similar problems with postings in German.

People, i'm very happy for you if your servers can handle expanded
character sets.  But frankly, that sort of thing isn't as useful as some
people think it is, especially when not EVERYBODY has access to such
things.  Please, out of compassion for your less well-endowed (or
differently-endowed) colleagues, try to restrict yourselves to the basic
ASCII character set when posting.  Thank you!

Best,
Steven
--
Steven Schaufele, Ph.D., Asst. Prof. of Linguistics, English Department
Soochow University, Waishuanghsi Campus, Taipei 11102, Taiwan, ROC
(886)(02)2881-9471 ext. 6504     fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw
Fax: (886)(02)2881-7609
http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html

        ***O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum!***
        ***Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis!***

[ Moderator's comment:
  I have pointed this out in the past, and been roundly excoriated for my point
  of view, taken somehow to be "English-only".  I will once again suggest that
  we adopt a modified TeX-like accent-writing system, in which the accent (in
  the typographical sense, which includes umlaut/diaeresis/trema and the like)
  is written next to the character affected.  (In TeX systems, it must precede,
  but I think that context can disambiguate for human readers.)  Should I send
  out a list of the TeX conventions, for those unused to them?
  --rma ]