Text 25467, 123 rader
Skriven 2008-12-31 01:23:28 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
     Kommentar till en text av Robert Bashe (2:2448/44)
Ärende: Special characters
==========================
Hello Robert,

On Tuesday December 30 2008 09:23, you wrote to me:

 MV>> Are you telling met that you have configured Golded to translate
 MV>> *incoming* accented and umlauted characters into the diftongs? You
 MV>> see the o umlaut in Björn as oe?

 RB> No, of course not.

Well, I could not imagine why anyone would want to do it outgoing...

 RB> Just everyhing I write is translated, which is the reason I can't just
 RB> type an Umlaut o to print B. Felten's first name.

So you type the special characters using your German keyboard and keyboard
driver, e.g. 'ö' and have Golded translate it into 'oe' on the way out. Why on
earth don't you just type 'oe' if that is the desired result?

 RB> It comes out "Bjoen", and he doesn't like that.

Of course he doesn't .

 RB> And doing a two-hand combination every time I write the name is simply
 RB> too much effort -

Oh c'mon, these special characters do not occur all that much, relatively
speaking. And don't you have to press the alt-gr key anyway for the special
characters?

 RB> I also can't make exceptions to the Umlaut/Eszet translations, it's
 RB> all or nothing.

Not so if you define groups in Golded. E.g.

GROUP G
        TEMPLATE GERMAN.TPL
        member ebbauser.ger
        member nodes.024
        member fidocon.bleichenbach.1996
        xlatexport CP850
ENDGROUP

Incorporate the translation table in the IBMPC - CP850 translation table. Do
not use character translation in other echos.

 RB> But I still don't understand why he gets so upset about this

I already explained to you that the transliteration can not be used in other
languages because many of the two character combinations have already been
taken. Did it never occur to you that "Bjoern" may have some less decent
meaning in Swedish?

We once had a sysop here called "Jan Höster". Writing his name as "Jan Hoester"
would have meant "John the Cougher". Slightly offensive....

 RB>  - I don't write Russian names in Cyrillic characters either, nor
 RB> for that matter does he.

And neither do I. There are limits to what one can expect in a forum where
English is the going language. I do not speak Russian and the Cyrillic alphabet
is not part of my vocabulary. Plus that my system does not support it in a DOS
window.

But for the accented and umlauted characters you not have that excuse. The
umlauted characters are part and parcel of the language of the country you have
lived in for over 30 years. Your hard- and software is perfectly capable of
dealing wth them. No excuse.

 MV>> So for non Fido texts you use accents umlauts and á's. Then I
 MV>> don't see why you would not use them in Fido either. Surely stone
 MV>> age hardware that can not display the few special characters in
 MV>> use in German has all been decomissioned by now?

 RB> Force of habit and it's still the general usage in R24. And who knows
 RB> how many old editors are still floating around?

O, c'mon. Only the very first versions of the IBM PC were 7 bits only.
Everything after the original XT can display an extended character set.

 RB> Why change a running system?

Because the results are unsatisfactory according to present standards?

 RB>>> As long as I only write English or German, my readers and I have
 RB>>> no problems. Maybe I just have a lucky combination.

 MV>> I think you do. It looks lke german is the excaption in that it
 MV>> has an offical or at least widely accepted transliteration for the
 MV>> special characters.

 RB> Actually, the Eszet is only a fancy way of writing "ss" (look at the
 RB> left and right portions and you'll easily see the double Fraktur "s"),

Hmmm.. I am not really familiar with Faktur. I find it very gard to read and I
think one of the good things Hitler did was banning it. Had he not done that,
it would have set you back at least a decade - if no two - in computer
technology.

 RB> and German Umlauts are not just vowels with two dots over them, but
 RB> vowels with two short, angled strokes above them. The two short
 RB> strokes are just an abbreviated form of writing an "e" in old German
 RB> script,

That, I did not know.

 RB> and in older texts you'll often see Umlauts represented as a
 RB> vowel with a tiny Fraktur "e" above it. So this kind of
 RB> transliteration is completely natural and logical to a German.

Also for the younger generation?

Anyway, that is for German. Other language use the two dots above the vowel in
a different way. The diaresis ( the name of the glyph) when used over a Dutch
'e' or 'i' is not an umlaut, but a "trema". It is used to indicate that two
vowels in succession are not to be pronounced as one compound vowel, but as two
separate vowels.


Cheers, Michiel

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