On Mon, 4 Aug 1997 18:22:10 -0500 Gilbert Brenson Lazan
<[log in to unmask]> said:
>I do not believe they are either few or decorative, Eric.
I meant few as in "not all that many hex codes to learn". It's not like
there are 4 possible accents on just about every vowel plus a handful of
consonants, like in some other languages.
>An average post could easily contain 20 -30 and they can signify the
>difference between tenses (past and present), meaning (ano vs. a=F1o)
>(si vs. s=ED) etc., pronunciation (especially en Proper Nouns),
>interrogation versus affirmation (the upsidedown question mark), etc.,
>without even going into cultural identity (I don't think you'd
>appreciate being suddenly turned into Erik Tomas just for someone else's
>convenience).
Actually, I stopped caring about the Erik bit a long time ago. A gringo
who lectures me about the language of my country, on the other hand, is
quite a bit more upsetting than a Swede who forgot the spelling of my
name because he only saw it once or maybe he only heard it, especially if
the reason for this mistake is that the gringo assumed *I* was a gringo -
the ultimate insult! ;-) Anyway, native speakers do know the proper
pronunciation of words, they don't need the accents to remind them. The
upside down question mark is redundant as you know, and accents which do
not affect pronunciation tend to have no impact on comprehension, for the
simple reason that you don't hear them when talking and people still
understand. I do concede that proper nouns can be an issue. 'Montanana'
could be 'Montanana' or 'Montan~ana' and this makes a big difference. In
general I agree that n~ is an issue in the same way that a"/a*/o" are an
issue in Swedish. But, other than in a handful of common words like
manana and ano, it does not occur all that often. The bulk of the
hard-to-read hex codes would be for i' and the like. Conversely, if
people were to drop the accents but keep n~, there would be only one hex
code to learn (two if you kept the inverted question mark, which only
occurs at the beginning of the sentence). Or you could do like the
Italians who often write a' (a + quote) rather than type the accented a.
>Is it just a matter of using a hex code? What is the difference between
>using the hex code and using a Spanish-language keyboard (pardon my
>ignorance)?
The data entry method (Spanish keyboard or special control sequence) does
not really matter. Roughly speaking, there are two ways to send accented
characters over the network. One is to just send them, and the other is
to encode them. If you just send them, people who have a mail system that
only supports 7-bit ASCII (which is unlikely in countries with accents in
the national language) will see a different character. For instance, the
Swedish a" becomes 'v' (or 'd', I forgot). While rare, this problem is
VERY annoying. If you encode and the recipient does not have a mail
program with MIME support, you see =F6 and so forth. This is the most
common problem. The more accents in the language, the more hex codes you
need to learn. I am used to having this problem with Swedish, where there
are only 3 hex codes to learn, and it is bearable. In French I would just
go insane, especially as accents are decorative.
From a tongue-in-cheek Latin American perspective, the reason this
encoding is necessary is that the gringos only provided support for THEIR
alphabet in the 1982 suite of protocols, purely to oppress us as usual.
While support for 8-bit characters was technically possible (and very
easy), it was not required for compliance. Rather than revise the
protocols to allow 8-bit characters, they required us to encode them,
just to remind us who rules the world and all that. On top of that they
had the nerve of saying that it was thanks to THEIR efforts that we would
finally be able to speak our own language over the Internet! Well it's
not like we had been waiting for them for permission, you know. We had
already been sending our 8-bit characters unencoded and we addressed the
protocol issue by simply selecting software that supported them. When a
major product only supported 7-bit, we refused to buy it until they fixed
it. Today all major products support 8-bit (unless of course you are
using an old version).
Either way there will always be purists and there will always be people
who are willing to make compromises to facilitate communication. This
goes beyond the technical issue of MIME support. For instance, I work
with a US keyboard, so typing accented characters means memorizing all
the codes and typing special escape sequences and generally going out of
my way and wasting a lot of time, even with the best software in the
world (sorry, but I can't memorize 5 different keyboard layouts either,
so a page code switcher is not an option). There is just not enough space
on a normal keyboard for all the accents in all the languages I may end
up using. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why I gave up on accents a
long time ago.
Eric
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