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From: rja7m@chaos.cs.Virginia.EDU (Ran Atkinson)
Newsgroups: comp.std.unix
Subject: Re: Internationalisation
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Date: 12 Oct 90 14:55:22 GMT
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Submitted-by: rja7m@chaos.cs.Virginia.EDU (Ran Atkinson)

While I am fond of Vietnamese, I'd like to suggest that it not be
used in future examples of internationalisation for several reasons
including the lack of a defined character set standard for Vietnamese.

A number of people, including me, were trying to come up with a reasonable
modification of the ISO 8859/1 standard and didn't because there are
too many combinations of diacriticals and vowels for each combination
to have its own 8-bit representation.  The folks behind UNISTD and
the ISO 32-bit character set proposal are working with Vietnamese in
mind, so we might eventually have a standard, but for now we don't.

Also, I think the example was erroneous.  I think that the example
was trying to say:  "chao` ca'c  o^ng" (where the diacriticals belong
above the vowels not after them and there is no real space in the place
where the diacritical appears above).  Also, I think that the above
means "Hello everyone" more nearly than "Hello World" (though its early
in the day and I might well not have the nearest translation either :-) 

As I say, It was really nice to see Vietnamese as the example, but I think
that for this newsgroup it would be more accessible to use a different
language next time...

  Ran
  randall@Virginia.EDU

P.S.
  Persons interested in Vietnamese discussions should move their postings to
soc.culture.vietnamese from comp.std.unix .





Volume-Number: Volume 21, Number 202