Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 4.3bsd-beta 6/6/85; site talcott.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!akgua!whuxlm!harpo!decvax!genrad!panda!talcott!tmb From: tmb@talcott.UUCP (Thomas M. Breuel) Newsgroups: net.nlang Subject: more diacritical marks... Message-ID: <487@talcott.UUCP> Date: Wed, 14-Aug-85 05:23:56 EDT Article-I.D.: talcott.487 Posted: Wed Aug 14 05:23:56 1985 Date-Received: Sun, 18-Aug-85 05:15:42 EDT Organization: Harvard University Lines: 44 [in reply to a letter by sommar@enea.UUCP, in which he argues that the problems connected with national letters and diacritical marks are problems with computers rather than of the language] Aside from that you learned in school that 'oA', '"A' and '"O' *are* letters, what is the necessity for their existence? Why do they need a separate slot in the dictionary? If they are anything like the German umlaute, you could easily replace them with 'Oa', 'Ae', and 'Oe', for example (if those letter combinations are not used in your language). Let me give you an example of what I would consider a valid *reason* for keeping a national character set: the Japanese very seriously considered Romanisation of their written language. They ultimately decided against it. Japanese is too rich in homophones (due to borrowing words from Chinese and dropping the tones) to represent it adequately in writing with a purely phonetic system. The advantage of having an internationally 'compatible' writing system did not outweigh the advantage of being able to distinguish homophones in the written language. If you can't come up with a very good linguistic reason for keeping your specific national characters, I think you should re-consider your position: most computers happen to be made in America, most typewriters do not have *your* national character set, programming languages use those codes that you are using for national characters for punctuation, and most people neither know nor care about your special way of arranging words in a dictionary or how to write your national characters. The full 'English' alphabet happens to be known to all users of the Roman writing system, and it happens to be the common subset of characters on typewriters and computers. And it is perfectly usable for the phonetic representation of languages as rich in sounds as English, German, or Chinese. I sincerely doubt that *your* language is phonetically so much more complex than these that you could not represent it easily (and in fact without any serious changes to your current use of the Roman writing system) with 26 letters and a handful of letter-combinations (like the German 'ch', 'sch', &c), and I am not aware of any Germanic language so rich in homophones that the introduction of special characters to distiguish them is warranted. Thomas.