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From: matt@brl-tgr.ARPA (Matthew Rosenblatt )
Newsgroups: net.nlang,net.text
Subject: Tyranny of the computer
Message-ID: <644@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 12-Aug-85 16:49:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.644
Posted: Mon Aug 12 16:49:58 1985
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> Diacritical marks, contracted letters, and special characters are
> not a sign of cultural identity -- they are annoying leftovers from
> a time in which people used to do most of their writing with a pen
> (or a brush, on the other side of the world). Let's hope they'll
> soon get out of fashion!
> 
> 						Thomas.

First, the traditional abbreviations for the American States had to go,
because they had a variable number of characters.  So now we live with
MA, CA, and DE instead of Mass., Cal., and Del.  But that's not enough
for the data processors!  Take the Roman alphabet, with EXACTLY those
additions (e.g., j and w) that Modern English had at the time speakers
of Modern English invented computer data processing.  AND THAT'S WHAT
YOUR LANGUAGE HAD BETTER USE, BUDDY!  No more cedilles for you Frenchmen
-- make that "Fransais."  No more tildes for you Spaniards.  No more
fadas for you Irishmen.  And you Scandinavians had better get into line,
too.

I don't believe that natural language, written or spoken, should serve
the needs of data processing.  Rather, how about the following deal:
We natural language users won't tell you data processors how to write
your FORTRAN or Extended Mercury Autocode.  You don't tell us how to
write our native languages.

				-- Matt Rosenblatt