Text 19777, 82 rader
Skriven 2011-06-05 23:27:13 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
     Kommentar till en text av Robert Bashe (2:2448/44)
Ärende: Censorship in Fidonet
=============================
Hello Robert,

On Sunday June 05 2011 09:32, you wrote to me:

 BF>>>> We were not allowed to use all the characters in our languages
 BF>>>> (and we still are not in the nodelist).

 RB>>> And only because not everyone can a) read wierd characters and b)
 RB>>> has software that won't belch when it sees them.

 MV>> And why do you thinks that is?

 RB> Because Fidonet was originally started up by a guy named Tom Jennings,
 RB> who was American and lived in California.

Well, there was this guy named Bill Gates who was an American and who lived in
Redmond, Washington who wrote (or stole, let's not argue that) an operating
system that became very popular for personal computers. Most FidoNet software
was written for that OS, BTW. Already very early in the games, even before Tom
Jennings wrote V1.0 of Fido, Bill Gates realised that ignoring the fact that
the world is bigger than the US and that to get his software accepted outside
the US, 26 letters won't do. Even the original IBM character set would not. So
we got code pages. With 20/20 hindsight a clumsy kludge, but at least Bill
Gates did not have that "fuck the rest attitude."

 RB> If he had been a Russian living in Minsk, we would doubtless have to
 RB> use a workaround to use Latin characters in our fido software.

I very much doubt that. Keep in mind that extended character sets already
existed when FidoNet was created. My educated guess is that had Fidonet emerged
anywhere else than in the USA, there would never have been an "my character set
only" rule. Had Fidonet emerged in teh Sovjet Union, Cyrillic might have been
the default character set, but surely not the only one allowed.

 RB>>> Your problem is the wierd name

 MV>> The very fact that you label it a "weird name" say a lot.

 RB> Because it is.

No, it isn't. Vowels with a diaresis - umlaut or otherwise - are in widespread
use in many European based languages. Same for accented characters. Nothing
"weird" about it.

 RB> Even Germans with Umlauts in their names don't insist on the Umlauts
 RB> in English correspondence - and in case you haven't
 RB> notices, we _do_ write English here.

So why do you write "Umlaut" with a cpaital 'U'?  In English nouns are not
capitalised. Only Germans do that....

 RB>  Bjorn does. And in contrast to
 RB> Germans, also rejects the transliteration.

There Is no transliteraion for the Swedish "Björn". Unless you want to
translate it into "Bear". But then you should not accept "Michiel" either.  I
English it would be "Michael"...

 MV>> There is no "normal transliteration". German is an exception. For
 MV>> Swedishand Dutch, there is no transliterartion. The 26 ASCII
 MV>> letters are just not enough to properly prodice written documents.

 RB> In that case, the only solution is not to use such characters.

No, that is not the only solution. How about dumping the "ASCII only rule".

 RB> I see nobody here using Cyrillic characters, Arabic or Chinese either.
 RB> What's so special about Bjorn that he demands for himself what neither
 RB> he nor others give to other groups?

Ehhh? What gives you the idea that Björn and others are not willing to return
the courtesy of having others spelled their name properly?

TTMBOK Björn is - like me - an advocate of getting Fidonet converted to
unicode, so that we can finally have extended Latin charaters AND Cyrilic in
one and the same message.


Cheers, Michiel

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