Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!att!emory!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!ncar!gatech!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!news.funet.fi!funic!polaris.utu.fi!polaris!sutela From: sutela@polaris.utu.fi (Kari Sutela) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Internationalism and phonemes (was Re: For all...advertizing Message-ID: Date: 31 Oct 90 07:21:32 GMT References: <1990Oct24.030917.18454@usenet.ins.cwru.edu> <693@macuni.mqcc.mq.oz> Organization: University of Turku, Finland Lines: 34 ifarqhar@sunc.mqcc.mq.oz.au (Ian Farquhar) writes: >In article sutela@polaris.utu.fi (Kari Sutela) writes: [I wrote about hardcoding a language on a chip] >Do phonems vary greatly from language to language? I'm not a linguist, but I'd think that they do (at least, a bit). I, for example, have had difficulties in producing reasonably sounding Finnish speech. On the other hand, this might be a problem with all languages --- the phonemes are just an approximation of the real human ones (or perhaps I just haven't tried hard enough). Anyway, if you think about non-european languages (for example, some african languages), I'd guess that there are indeed phonemes which can't be produced with the ones which we are using. >One feature that I would like to see in AmigaOS is the provision of >support for internationalism ie. a library that knows what time zone >the user is in, what their system of measurement is (ie. metric or >otherwise), the language, the currency, date formats etc. Exactly, I agree. On the other hand, I seem to remember a vague comment (by someone from CATS?) about a locale.library in OS 2.0 --- is there such a beast in 2.0? I'd think that such a library should also provide functions for deciding word-breaking characters, etc. I find it annoying when a text-editor word-wraps and breaks a Finnish word into two, just because it considered an umlaut-a a non-word characte. Preferably all accented characters should be considered as word-characters --- one doesn't always write in one language, for example, foreign names could include strange, accented characters. Kari Sutela sutela@polaris.utu.fi -- Kari Sutela sutela@polaris.utu.fi