[Lexicog] Who Said What?

[Benjamin J Barrett]

I use a Japanese OS, I was once asked to be careful about my settings as
one of my e-mails caused somebody's e-mail application to prompt them to
download Japanese characters. (I didn't use any Japanese, but something
in there must have been encoded as such.)

It's only happened once, though.

On the other hand, some of those tilded letters came through as Chinese
characters on my system :)

BB

-----Original Message-----
From: Koontz John E [mailto:john.koontz at colorado.edu]


On Mon, 27 Sep 2004, Peter Kirk wrote:
> Ken, I wonder if you have ever thought that it might be offensive to
> others on an international list to insist that they write their own
> languages, not properly with the international standard code which
> supports them, but in a form mangled to fit an American code, ASCII?

For my own part, I carefully didn't insist, but only pointed out my
difficulties.  I did consider that it might be offensive and thought
people would be likely to be understanding.  In the case in
question I thought it fairly likely that the unusual character set in
question was not the native character set of the user, but an exotic one
calculated to represent that language of the example.  In general it is
easy enought to deduce what is happening in the case of the more common
international sets, and I can and do live with that.  I suspect my
"ASCII"
punctuation must sometimes look similarly odd at the receiving end.

Note that I said ASCII, but meant whatever ISO set the University Unix
system and pine have selected between them.  Email standards are really
not particularly well adapted to advanced character set usages as yet,
but
I believe ISO standards have supeceded ASCII standards essentially
everywhere.  For example, the a-acute and n-tilde of Ken's Ibanez
example
came through intact.

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