William Safire

[Deborah Hoffman]

I for one am still having problems with proper display
of non-Latin characters.  (Supposedly the Unicode will
solve all this, although I'm not sure how).  Then
there is the KOI-8-KOIR-KOIU-ISO-Windows issue which I
never will understand, except that it periodically
requires me to pull down my View menu and adjust the
settings.  Netscape persistently refuses to display
Cyrillic characters in its toolbar search results,
although it does fine for most other things.  Opera
will not perform a "find" operation on a Cyrillic web
page of any type, which means that if I would rather
not wade through a bunch of text, I have to open the
same window separately in Explorer and search with its
find function.  And sometimes email to Russia has to
go in a Word attachment because of vaguaries on the
other end.

Anybody in possession of any secrets on this matter
(or plans for a UN-led invation), otzovites'!

-----------------------------------------------------
Readers without access to the paper edition will=20
find it with a search for "Poutine" in the search=20
box of <http://www.nytimes.com/> or by following=20
this link:=20
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03ONLANGUAGE.html>.=20
(Registration necessary, but free of charge.)

I especially enjoyed this fine piece of
uninformedness:

"[...] maybe the United Nations will find a new=20
raison d'=EAtre (that's ray-ZON DET-ra) in=20
standardizing a system to encode Roman and=20
Cyrillic letters and Chinese and Japanese=20
characters to make them computer-friendly on all=20
the world's screens. [...]=A0 For users of=20
tomorrow's Internet to accurately cross cultures,=20
experts in phonetics and transliteration will=20
first have to create and agree on a standard=20
system."

And imagine if they find a way of transmtting sound by
computers!


Deborah Hoffman
Graduate Assistant
Kent State University
Department of Modern and Classical Language Studies

http://www.personal.kent.edu/~dhoffma3/index.htm

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