Sign Language of Turkey

[Mark A. Mandel]

(Private email, not posted.)

I've been following this discussion with interest. You probably don't
realize, though, that your post contains some characters that don't go
reliably through email.

You wrote:

>>>
Finally we asked the native signers about how they call
their language.  They call is just  ?º saret dili  l  meaning Sign
Language.
<<<

To me, using Lotus Notes Mail under Windows 98, the Turkish phrase and the
adjacent words appear as

>>>
     just
     <space> <space> <black block> <masculine ordinal> <space>
     saret dili
     <space> <space>
     l
     <space> <space>
     meaning
<<<

My guess is that the garbage and blanks represent 8-bit, non-ASCII curly
quotes, which your word processor calls "smart quotes" (and I call "too
smart for its own good") and inserts automatically when you type the ASCII
'"' character. Or they may be formatting characters that are supposed to
turn italics or some other font feature on and off. Regardless, they don't
travel well.

Sincerely,
Mark A. Mandel

                  Mark A. Mandel : Senior Linguist
 Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company : speech recognition
 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com