Article 1966 of alt.best.of.internet: Path: news.csos.orst.edu!flop.ENGR.ORST.EDU!gaia.ucs.orst.edu!umn.edu!news-feed-2.peachnet.edu!concert!rutgers!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!decwrl!decwrl!netcomsv!netcom.com!tor From: tor@netcom.com (Tor Slettnes) Newsgroups: alt.best.of.internet Subject: Re: Global Paradox Message-ID: Date: 20 Aug 93 20:23:57 GMT References: <1993Aug20.141548.14915@fcom.cc.utah.edu> Organization: Not very much Lines: 66 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Mime-Version: 1.0 +------ The wit of hatunen@netcom.com (DaveHatunen): | 3. ASCII is an American standard used in telecommunications; it doesn't | do well with international accents and diacriticals +------ Yes, but then: (1) "ASCII" is no longer a preferred term. "US-ASCII" is today the official name, because "ASCII" is often confused with national variants that replace brackets with characters for the following character codes: [\]{|} (2) "ISO-8859-1", or "ISO Latin 1" is a character set that is a superset of US-ASCII. While ASCII is 7 bits, ISO Latin 1 is 8, and has space for the most common accented characters. If you read ISO Latin 1 correctly, you will see: f = ae x = o-slash e = a-ring " = cent # = British pound > = 3/4 This character set is used in international newsgroups on Usenet. (Also, for Chinese writing, the 8th bit is used to initialize a Chinese character sequence). Unfortunately, the PC in text mode uses another system of character sets, and the Mac uses yet another. So people who do not have a translation table for their DOS communication programs, often cause problems.. :-/ (Such tables are available, look for xlate.zip). ISO Latin 1 is used under Unix/X11, MS Windows(*), Amiga, and Atari.. Windows NT also supports a 16-bit character set, Unicode, that is a superset of ISO Latin 1... +------ | 4. English is becoming the lingua franca (lingua americana?) of the world, | and especially the technical world, and most people in technical fields | wherever they are, learn it. +------ Yet, in newsgroups restricted to local areas, other languages are preferred. Which is good; the world would be much poorer without the variety of languages, as each language also come with its own way of thinking, behaving.. +------ | 5. If you post in Albanian, or Viet Namese or somesuch, you may ahve some | ethnic satisfaction from the act, but it will go largely unread, since | a German is much less likely to know Albanian than English. +------ Not if you post in 'viet.general' (If such a groups existed...) (Now, of course, to write vietnamese, you would need LOTS of accents, not all of them are even in ISO Latin 1...) +------ | 6. Although English (American) spelling sucks swampwater (as does French, | btw), the language itself is almost totally free from declensions and | such and is really quite easy to learn, at least to the point of being | able to be understood. +------ And it is also a very 'plain' language in terms of implied nuances, and "spiritual" effects.. :-) -tor