Upper ASCII and email

[Dan Parvaz]

> Question: Since the Deaf in Turkey call their language ü saret dili, 
> why is
> the abbreviation not USD? This would not be in the way of any sign 
> language
> for which SL is used in the abbreviation.

Part of this is the result of upper-ASCII characters mentioned by Mark, 
which don't read well across different platforms. I use Mac OS X's 
(well, really NeXT's) Mail.app, so  most non-US Windows code pages get 
garbled -- but I don't get VBA viruses either :-)

So here's the deal:

It's "Isaret Dili", where the capital "I" has a dot on it (high, front, 
unrounded) and the "s" has a cedille below it (voiceless palato-alveolar 
fricative).

"Turkce" has an umlaut over the "u" (high front rounded), and a cedille 
under the "c" (voiceless palato-alveolar stop).

In the good ol' days of 7-bit ASCII, I noticed Turkish folks not really 
caring about the umlauts, since native speakers could generally tell 
from context (and vowel harmony) which word was which.

Question for Ulrike: what does the Turkish sign for SIGN look like?

Cheers,

Dan.