🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2293@enea.UUCP>, sommar@enea.UUCP (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
> srg@quick.COM (Spencer Garrett) writes:
> >I'm the one who posted the remark about English and Russian being the only
> >two languages written using unaccented alphabets.  Perhaps I should have
> >made the distinction more clear.  By "unaccented" I meant "written without
> >overstrikes" and "sorted one letter at a time in a fixed order".  These
> >characteristics make dealing with computers a darn sight easier, and thus
> >represent advantages in this context.  By this metric modern English and
> >Russian qualify.  
> 
> Don't you get the feeling that we are just going round and round in this
> discssuion? Since Mr. Garrett seems to have missed a lot of the discussion,
> I will have to repeat. English is by no means unique among the latin-written
> languages. Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and I guess also Dutch
> qualify as well. 
>
> That has nothing to do with simplicity. It as just a matter of dominating
> culture. If French had been the leading language, computers would
> have been able to handles accents decently today. (Et, ils avraient parl'e
> le fran,cais.)

I didn't mean to imply that ONLY English and Russian qualify, but there's
been a lot of discussion to the effect that they didn't.  I speak both
languages and can comment directly in this case.  (I've also studied
Latin, French, and Esperanto.  I think the Romans must have invented
keypunch machines, and of course saw no need for lower case.  Please
don't forget that my original article was a request for comments about
an assertion I'd heard and couldn't personally refute.)  As I said in my
last article, I'm told that the Scandinavian languages COULD fit this mold
well, but they have too many vowels to use the stock Latin alphabet, so we'd
have to add some letters.  They also differ from one another, thus my comment
about "proliferation of standards".  French is a different story.  Their
accents do not form different letters and really couldn't.  That's okay.
I LIKE French, but it's a pain to type (not too bad to write) and the
accents seriously complicate things like strcmp and WYSIWYG screen editors.
You're right, cultural dominance does have a lot to do with this, but
it is far from the only factor.  There's as much computing going on in
Europe as there is in North America, I'm told.

> >The cost of implementing a "superset" standard is unfortunately
> >unacceptable.  (Imagine merely doubling the size of all the "text" files
> >on your system!)  
> 
> And stupid me, thinking we had computers to make things easier and better.
> Forever, I will do better with a simple pen or a typewriter. :-)
> Of course we can afford a better character standard! We have computers
> to serve and help us, not rule and delimit us!

I actually voiced a desire for some superset alphabet like JIS so we
could at least display each others' languages and "fix" languages like
the Scandinavian group which only need a few more characters and perhaps
a shuffling of their order to come into line, but Amos Shapir (down in
Israel) pointed out the folly of that.  I scrape by with 153Mb on my SUN
system, but at least 2/3 of that is text.  If the new character encoding
standard were merely 16 bits instead of 8 (and there have been plenty
who think that wouldn't be enough) then I'd have to add 100Mb of disk
to my system just to stay even.  Looks like ad hoc approaches will have
to do for now.

I'd like to thank all the people who sent me *informative* replys to my
original posting (nearly all by e-mail).  May we drop this now?