[Lexicog] Who Said What?

[Peter Kirk]

On 27/09/2004 22:52, Koontz John E wrote:

>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. ...
>

Understood. I was happy with how you put things, but not so happy with
Ken's wording.

>... 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.
>
>

I'm sorry that some might not have been able to read my Azerbaijani
examples (try "UTF-8" if you need to select an encoding manually). But
although it is not my native character set, it is not an "exotic" one,
certainly not in the eyes of Azerbaijanis for whom it is their regular
orthography. It is not their fault that 1960's and 1980's computer
standards did not support their language. But the 1990's one, Unicode,
does. If anyone needs it, I will create a PDF of my Azerbaijani
examples, which is probably the safest way to transmit it.

>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.
>
>
>
ISO 8859-xx standards replaced ASCII probably in the 1980's, but ISO
10646 (= Unicode) replaced ISO 8859-xx in the 1990's. The standards are
clearly specified and have been for at least ten years, at least in
their basic structure and support for simple variants of Latin script.
University systems really should have been upgraded to support this by
now, after ten years. But I realise that this can be outside individual
users' control.

--
Peter Kirk
peter at qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk at qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/




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