At 06:22 PM 8/4/97 -0500, Gilbert Brenson Lazan wrote:
>At 11:40 PM 4/08/1997 +0200, Eric Thomas wrote:
>>I am not sure I understand the  problem as accents in Spanish are few and
>>decorative
>
>I do not believe they are either few or decorative, Eric.  An average post
>could easily contain 20 -30 and they can signify the difference between
>tenses (past and present), meaning (ano vs. año) (si vs. sí) 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).  

As the "lucky owner" of a name which few can manage to both spell correctly
and pronounce correctly, I'll assure you... you DO get used to it, and
it ceases to bother you.

Eric, though, is at little risk.  And both of us have names in the ASCII
character set.

The real problem you're looking at is the "8-bit" character set, which has
not been standardized... indeed, once upon a time it might have actually
broken email transmission, though that's probably not true any more.
But when you type an "a with an accent mark over it" which is being sent as
the bit string "11100001", different mail clients will do different things
with it.  Indeed, for all I know, your "a with an accent mark over it" may
show up as an "o with a slash through it" on someone else's machine for all
that you or I can tell.

There's a MIME standard for passing 8-bit stuff, but I'm not sure whether
it actually ascribes meaning or display to the specific characters.  Even
so, we can be pretty sure it hasn't yet been universally implemented; in your
original post, I saw an "a with accent mark" but in the first followup to it,
the 3-character string "=E1" appeared in quoted text.  (Same for the other letters.)

My conclusion:  Listserv appears to pass 8-bit through, but some mail clients
will still get confused.  And, heck, I often prefer to dump an email
message to a file and use an editor I *like* rather than something attached
to a MIME-aware mail client with a sucky editor, and the result is I may
find myself editing stuff with "=E1" in it.

>>of course if  the proposal came from  a gringo and
>>was worded in  an unfortunate way, I  can see how people  might get upset
>
>After living and working in South America for the last 25 years, and
>publishing several books (in both languages) on transcultural
>communication, I believe that I have learned to (usually) avoid wording
>things in an unfortunate way.

Try this:  "The original character set for email was the ASCII character
set consisting of decimal values from 32 through 127.  While email now
seems to pass pretty much anything, poor results may be obtained due
to use of extended character sets; people may not see what you want,
and (in some cases) you may even set their screen to blinking, or erase
it or cause other irritating things to happen.

"For reasons like this, our list would like you to use only the standard
ASCII character set for posting.  Failing to do so is not the end of the
world, but what you think you wrote will not be seen similarly by people
who don't have the same computer setup as you.  We wish there were a
standard way of sending extended characters recognizably, but in point
of fact, there just isn't at present.  Thanks, your list-despot"

Something like that isn't too "gringo-ish" I hope... and is 100% true.
Heck, if you want, make the point that gringos invented email and
were probably just lacking in foresight about the uses to which it
might later evolve.  But don't be *too* hard on the gringos.

>
>Best wishes,
>
>
>Gil

Cheers,
Stan