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From: srg@quick.COM (Spencer Garrett)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,sci.lang
Subject: accented alphabets and computers
Message-ID: <120@quick.COM>
Date: Sun, 20-Sep-87 05:41:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: quick.120
Posted: Sun Sep 20 05:41:53 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 20-Sep-87 23:41:02 EDT
Organization: Quicksilver Engineering, Seattle
Lines: 28
Xref: mnetor comp.std.internat:252 sci.lang:1431

I'm the one who posted the remark about English and Russian being the only
two languages written using unaccented alphabets.  Perhaps I should have
made the distinction more clear.  By "unaccented" I meant "written without
overstrikes" and "sorted one letter at a time in a fixed order".  These
characteristics make dealing with computers a darn sight easier, and thus
represent advantages in this context.  By this metric modern English and
Russian qualify.  We use accents in English only to write foreign words
which use modified Roman alphabets.  We transliterate other languages
because a) few people would even be able to pronounce the words, much less
understand them and b) we often don't have the facilities to render other
writing schemes.  The Russian letters "yo" and "e kratkoe" are not accented
letters by this definition.  They have their own keys on typewriters, their
own place in the collating sequence, and presumably their own values in
whatever character code Russian computers use (RSCII ?).  The only exceptions
which have come to my attention are minor languages which use the English
alphabet, presumably because they were codified by English-speaking
missionaries and such.  I don't mean to imply by all this that I think
other languages are inferior and should be changed or forgotten, but I do
think this observation helps explain why English is so often used to talk
to computers even in non-English-speaking countries.  With the advent of
configurable keyboards and bitmapped screens (I know a Russian major who
does all her papers on a Macintosh) we could conceivably "fix" this problem
for some languages (e.g. the Scandinavian group) by giving the accented
letters their own keys and character codes, at the cost of a proliferation
of standards.  The cost of implementing a "superset" standard is unfortunately
unacceptable.  (Imagine merely doubling the size of all the "text" files
on your system!)  I don't think there will ever be a *solution* to this
problem, just various ways of dealing with its existence.