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From: lisper@yale.UUCP (Bjorn Lisper)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Change the software or the alphabet?
Message-ID: <18306@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 30-Oct-87 21:58:45 EST
Article-I.D.: yale-cel.18306
Posted: Fri Oct 30 21:58:45 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 10-Nov-87 01:19:13 EST
References: <1446@haddock.ISC.COM> <365@zuring.cwi.nl> <1924@kuukkeli.tut.fi>
Reply-To: lisper@yale-celray.UUCP (Bjorn Lisper)
Organization: Yale University Computer Science Dept, New Haven CT
Lines: 64
Xref: mnetor comp.std.internat:309 sci.lang:1667

In article <1924@kuukkeli.tut.fi> hmj@kuukkeli.UUCP (Hannu-Matti J{rvinen) writes:
>In article <1446@haddock.ISC.COM> karl@haddock.isc.com (Karl Heuer) writes:
>>                                          The alphabet is the servant of Man,
>> not the other way around; thus it is appropriate to suggest that it should
>> evolve to meet Man's changing needs.
>> If it is painful to adapt the software to handle the peculiarities of
>> certain 
>> languages/alphabets (I have in mind Chinese, Japanese, and to a lesser
>> extent 
>> the accented letters of some European languages, and to some extent
>> English), 
>> then it is reasonable to consider the possibility that the language/alphabet
>> should change instead of the software.  I am not saying that the former
>> *must* 
>> be the one to change, only that it should be considered.  I recognize that
>> there's a lot of inertia to overcome, but might not the benefits be worth
>> it? 
>
>Is this a joke or are you really stupid enough to be serious?
>Those so called "accented" letters are very important in some languages.
>How would you change alphabets using them as separate letters?
>If { refers to a with dots (umlaut a), I may write two Finnish
>words
>	valittaa  and
>	v{litt{{
>having meanings "mourn" and "deliver". So, replacing { with a can not be
>done.  Letter e can be after letters a or o, so replacing { with ae
>can not be done.
>
>Finnish is written as it is spoken.  Every letter has only one way to
>pronounce it.  If you drop letters off, how would you write words
>containing those letters?
>
>This all is (partially) true for several languages (e.g. Swedish and German).
>KEEP YOUR NASTY FINGERS OUT OF OUR ALPHABET AND FIX YOUR PROGRAMME(R)S!!
>
There are, of course, sometimes ways to transcribe "nonstandard" characters
to "standard" (with regard to the English character set) characters that is
unambiguous. The three special Swedish letters a-with-circle,
a-with-dieresis and o-with-dieresis, for instance, have the transcriptions
aa, ae and oe, respectively. Thus all Swedish words can really be
transcribed to "English" form. Context will then decide whether for instance
"oe" means o-with-dieresis or o followed by e.

But why did the Swedish character set include these extra characters in the
first place? The answer is that Swedish has more vowels than can be
expressed with ordinary latin characters without resorting to constructions
as above and these "extra" vowels ARE AS IMPORTANT AS THE OTHERS for the
meaning of the words and should not be treated differently; thus they
deserve characters of their own. This is also economical since these vowels
are frequent in Swedish and "single character codes" for them saves work and
space.

Another aspect is that according to the Swedish pronounciation rules "oe"
should really be pronounced as "o" followed by "e", so the usage of this for
o-with-dieresis should clutter the swedish pronounciation rules with
"unswedish" exceptions.

The alphabet is certainly the servant of Man, especially is a national
alphabet the servant of the people of the nation in question.

Bjorn Lisper	(for ignorant anglosaxons)
Bjoern Lisper	(for somewh