Xref: utzoo comp.fonts:2551 soc.culture.german:4372 Newsgroups: comp.fonts,soc.culture.german Path: utzoo!utgpu!cunews2!bnrgate!scrumpy!bnrmtl@bnr.ca!lewis From: lewis@bnrmtl.bnr.ca (Pierre LEWis) Subject: Re: Umlaute [was: naive (...question about uncial...) ] Message-ID: <1991May22.131136.25113@scrumpy@.bnr.ca> Sender: news@scrumpy@.bnr.ca (USENET NEWS KJ) Reply-To: bnrmtl!lewis@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu Organization: Bell-Northern Research Montreal, Canada. References: <1991Apr24.152455.22367@engage.enet.dec.com> Date: Wed, 22 May 91 13:11:36 GMT In article , holley@sono.uucp (Greg Holley) writes: > There aren't that many diacrital marks and unique letters in the > Western European languages, and many computer programs I use are able > to use them. The only problem is that, in the absence of an > international 8-bit standard, the programs can't trade umlauts and > tildes with one another. The solution is to come up with a standard, > rather than to ban the marks and make the world blander. Actually there are too many. IBM has one (based on EBCDIC) which our mainframe printers support, DEC has one with their VT-100 (which I use in the Unix world - even works in my xterm), and MS-DOS has the new code page 850 (works great for me with WP). Just to name a few. But it's unfortunate that foreign language support is quite weak on many machines and softwares. What Unix editor today supports diacritical marks? But that's a discussion for comp.editors. On eszet. Seems to me that in modern german they are often used where "ss" is also used: z.B. wir muessen, ich muB (B stands for eszet here). So if there is no eszet on the keyboard, I'll certainly prefer "ss" to "sz". Second, when on goes all caps in modern german, I learned that the eszet is replaced by "SS", not "SZ" and that is what I remember observing in print (UNREGELMASSIGE ENGLISCHE VERBEN just found in my dictionary, in lower case one would have unregelmaBige (both As are umlauts here of course)). Notwithstanding the origin of the eszet (as the name says). -- Pierre LEWIS +1 514 765 8207 Internet: bnrmtl!lewis@Larry.McRCIM.McGill.EDU P.S. I enjoy(ed) this stream...