Xref: utzoo soc.culture.nordic:1617 comp.std.internat:561
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!cornell!stefan
From: stefan@svax.cs.cornell.edu (Kjartan Stefansson)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.nordic,comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: ASCII for national characters
Message-ID: <34596@cornell.UUCP>
Date: 26 Nov 89 03:00:57 GMT
References: <472@enea.se> <1353@krafla.rhi.hi.is> <2360@draken.nada.kth.se> <1373@krafla.rhi.hi.is> <1383@krafla.rhi.hi.is> <1386@krafla.rhi.hi.is>
Sender: nobody@cornell.UUCP
Reply-To: stefan@svax.cs.cornell.edu (Kjartan Stefansson)
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY
Lines: 37

In article <1386@krafla.rhi.hi.is> einari@rhi.hi.is (Einar Indridason) writes:
>In article <1383@krafla.rhi.hi.is> magnus@rhi.hi.is (Magnus Gislason) writes:
>>heimir@rhi.hi.is (Heimir Thor Sverrisson) writes:
>>
>>[Talking about the Icelandic alphabet]
>>
>>>The first point is certainly true, our alphabet has 36 characters, which
>>>means that we need 20 characters (uc+lc) that are not in ASCII. I would
>>
>>You should know that the Icelandic alphabet does not include C, Q, W and Z,
>>and thus only contains 32 characters. :-)


We can argue about this, but the main point is of course, that for
every practical purposes, Icelanders need to deal with those 36
characters.  For instance, every character you mention, appears in
the phone directory  -- names of Icelandic people.   (although the
roots of their names are typically foreign, or poor foreign imitation :-)

>But I'm really pissed off (no 'pizza' here :-) about 'americaned' software which
>does not allow us here in Iceland to use our full national character set.
...[examples deleted]
>If there are any software-writers out there, please consider us Icelanders
>(and other), that must use 8-bit character set.

Reminds me of this fantastic software called X11.  They have several
nice fonts, including the full ISO-8859-1 standards.  But typically
applications strip the most significant bit in the data, so they can
only display the English set :-(

Of course there is always a way to go around it, and I know Icelanders
have managed to hack their way through, in several cases.  But that
simply illustrates how stupid the design was, not to make this an
option in the first place.


Kjartan.