[Lexicog] Who Said What?

[Kenneth C. Hill]

I thoroughly agree with John. Let's try to keep our postings maximally
readable. I also agree with Bill Poser that Unicode is A Good Idea, but
since many recipients can't deal with various different kinds of encoding,
much less the different colors John cites, I plan to continue using the
ASCII-compatible representations that I've been using since DOS days. I
often have to flip among various encoding settings in Microsoft Internet
Explorer before examples cited by members of this list are readable.
Probably many out there are using software that doesn't allow that.

I propose that we adopt some simple shortcuts to some representational
problems, e.g., using capital letters to represent things like
superscripts or certain difficult-to-access diacritics. Thus, to cite the
sort of example John has discussed in earlier exchanges about
superscripts, one could write aN for nasalized a (a followed by
superscript n) versus an for the sequence a + n. Similarly one could N for
the Portuguese tilde or the Polish nazalization hook: SaNo Paulo, Lech
Wal/eNsa. Another example: In communications with colleagues in Mexico,
many of whom have had access to only very primitive email systems, I have
found that the expedient of using a capital letter to represent a letter
with a diacritic -- no matter which one! -- is much preferred over a
representation simply leaving out the markers. Thus "IbANez" is preferred
as a representation of the spelling Ibáñez over "Ibanez". These solutions
look ugly to be sure, but at least both good linguistic representation and
communication are guaranteed. Let's restrict the use of exotic characters
to the dictionaries we produce and keep our email readable.

--Ken

--- Koontz John E <john.koontz at colorado.edu> wrote:

> For what it's worth, I think some of you must be using color or some
> similar convention to clarify who said what in your posts.  Those of us
> who are still using ASCII-based Unix mail tools like pine can't see
> anything but "black and white" text.  Of course, it might really be blue
> and white or black and gray or something like that.  I grant this may be
> a case of inadequate tools yielding inadequate results.
>
> Similarly, use of exotic character sets (a very relative thing,
> exotic-ness, I realize) means that the text of examples in particular
> cases end up reduced, more or les, to gibberish.  I generally can't even
> separate the actual characters from quoting characters inserted around
> them without very careful study.  Again I must admit that this could be
> described as my own problem imposed by a deliberately faulty choice of
> tools.  I say "those of us," but I may very well be the only one!
>
>



	
		
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