🚀 go-pugleaf

In a recent article srg@quick.UUCP (Spencer Garrett) writes:
>I was told once (by a respected linguist, as I recall) that English and
>Russian are the ONLY two languages written with unaccented alphabets.  

Jean-Francois Lamy stated something similar some days ago. In a private
letter he admitted that this is true if you look at it from an ASCII 
point of view. 
  Let me straighten you out about this confusion. Very few pairs of 
languages have a common alphabet. Thus, one langauge will probably
appear "accented" from the point the of other. ("accented" here also
including umlauts, extra letters, digraphs etc.). So of course, looking
from English all other languages may appear accented.
  However, there are alphabets that are equal to English. As an example,
I take my own, Swedish. Yes, we have A with dots and ring and O with dots,
but they wouldn't cause any problem, if we would like to define a Swedish 
character standard code disregarding all other languages, just like ASCII. 
They are just three more letters at the end of the alphabet.
  Now, if we look at English from a Swedish point of a view, does English
has any "accents"? Yes, they have W. W exists in Swedish to, but only
in proper names and is co-sorted with V. If we had dominated the computer
world like the English-speaking are, we would probably have hard to 
understand why you couldn't replace W with V or accept it having a 
code miles away from the others. (No, no ":-)" here. I'm completely 
serious.)
  The interesting point is here that quite many languages could have
the simple 8-bit enumerate for representing and sorting characters. 
English can, Swedish can (if we forget W), but German and French can not.
  For the sake of completeness, we should add that both Swedish and
English do use "e" with acute accent, mainly in French loan words.
(E.g. "clich'e") In Swedish you can also find in names with U with dots,
being co-sorted with Y. 
  
Newsgroup note: I have inluded both sci.lang and comp.std.internat
for sci.lang people that do not the other group. I have, howvere,
only comp.std.internat in the follow-up line, since I feel that the
discussion belongs more to this group than sci.lang.
-- 

Erland Sommarskog       
ENEA Data, Stockholm    
sommar@enea.UUCP