Why no Cyrillic?

[Bill Leidy]

Hello, I'd like to add a few words about problems with Cyrillic in e-mails. I get the SEELANGS in digest form, and very often the Cyrillic comes out in equal signs and hexadecimal numbers as you see below. I think this has something to do with the variety of default encodings people use or perhaps how the SEELANGS compiles the digest and chooses an encoding for the entire e-mail. Anyway, no matter how I change the character encoding in Mozilla Thunderbird, I can't fix the row of hexadecimal into something readable. Как жаль!

So, unless I'm doing something wrong on my end, you can see how Cyrillic has a tendency to not come out correctly, even on Slavic mailing lists when delivered in digest form.

bill

Date:    Wed, 4 Feb 2009 16:41:39 -0500
From:    Richard Robin <rrobin at GWU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Why no Cyrillic?

*=D0=94=D0=BE=D1=80=D0=BE=D0=B3=D0=B8=D0=B5 SEELANG=D0=BE=D0=B2=D1=86=D1=8B=
!*

I'm going to play my broken record over again. Cyrillic could travel well
over e-mail platforms if everyone obeyed the well established rules (the
short version: UTF-8). But there's always a way to use a recalcitrant
institutional e-mail address and still send and receive Cyrillic. See
http://www.gwu.edu/~slavic/gw-cyrillic/cyrilize.htm#cmail<http://www.gwu.ed=
u/%7Eslavic/gw-cyrillic/cyrilize.htm#cmail>.
(It explains the "UTF-8" as well as what to do when you get gibberish.)

I realize that I sing this song a lot. But exchange of information in
written Russian is a part of 21st Century Russian literacy. We don't allow
our first-year students to hand in transliterated homework. We even insist
that they learn Cyrillic script. (I don't know any Russian teacher who buys
the *"I never use script in English!"* excuse.) Computer literacy is
analogous.

That said, I will be the first to admit that I sometimes accompany my
Cyrillic to this list with transliteration (=D0=BD=D0=B0 =D0=B2=D1=81=D1=8F=
=D0=BA=D0=B8=D0=B9 =D0=BF=D0=BE=D0=B6=D0=B0=D1=80=D0=BD=D1=8B=D0=B9 =D1=81=
=D0=BB=D1=83=D1=87=D0=B0=D0=B9 - na
vsiakii pozharnyi sluchai) when I need to reach the widest audience.

But I would hope that as a profession, we are striving towards overcoming
the technical difficulties of Cyrillic in e-mail, both public and private,
precisely because for those who deal in Russian, it is part of our
communicative sphere.

Sincerely,
Richard Robin

P.S. And I'll be glad to take a look at whatever e-mail from a Russian
company didn't arrive with Cyrillic intact. That should never have happened
and should be fixable. Or else I'm going to end up eating a lot of crow!

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