AV>>>> without any characters from the 0x80...0xFF range.
BF>>> Why?
MvdV> Why indeed...
Because these are not modern English letters in the modern 26 character English alphbet and havn't been for a few hundred years.
AV>> The working language of this echoarea is English,
MvdV> Yes.
He got that right, but the rest of it is pure bullshit.
MvdV> But that does not mean that only English names are allowed.
English spelling is required in text used to communicate, but an exception is in order of spelling names, if they can make it through the many links that handle that message can reproduce. If not, then we see the jumbled mess that can be seen here as a shining example of how not to spell a Svede name such as Bjorn's. And, if he wasn't such a jerk, he would do that to save the amount of BS that has been wasted in arguments for or against. Therefore, he has earned his nickname.
MvdV> If we would allow only English names, we would have to ban Janis MvdV> Kracht en Joe Delahaye. "Kracht" is Dutch and translates to "Force" MvdV> in English.
What he's saying is that some immigrants decided to translate there surnames to English or retain the original spelling or a reasonable facsimile. No less, no more. We have a John Force in America (he's famous) and we have a Janis Kracht. OTH, my ancestors were from Prussia, aka Germany today, near today's Polish border. But, the surname is also used in England, and the spelling is identical to the German version.
MvdV> "Delahaye" is French and translates to "Fromthehague". So they MvdV> would have to write as "Janis Force" and "Joe Fromthehague".
Not really, as both spellings are used in English as well. Joe's ancestors or his parents decided not to change the name and continued the spelling when they immigrated to the US.
MvdV> Of course we don't ask them to do that. Just as we do not ask you MvdV> to change your name to "Alex".
Although Alex would be acceptable in English, as it represents a shortened version of your first name. Sometimes it is very awkward to use complete first names and so we shorten them for convenience in writing as well as speaking. Just as it is unusual to find a person who spells his name such as Michiel, when Michael is the English norm...and quite often Michael is shortened to Mike for the convenience of writing and speaking it.
AV>> and all 26 capital and 26 small letters of English alphabet reside AV>> in the 0x40...0x7F range.
MvdV> The English alphabet is larger than that.
Wrong. In the orthography of Modern English, thorn, eth, wynn, yogh ash (æ), and ethel (o) (most of these are hard to reproduce in a FTN reader) are obsolete and have been since Old English evolved into Modern English, circa 1011-1612 AD..
Latin borrowings reintroduced homographs of ash and ethel into Middle English and Early Modern English, though they are not considered to be the same letters but rather ligatures, and in any case are somewhat old fashioned.
Thorn and eth were both replaced by th, though thorn continued in existence for some time, its lowercase form gradually becoming graphically indistinguishable from the minuscule y in most handwriting. Y for th can still be seen in pseudo-archaisms such as "Ye Olde Booke Shoppe".
Wynn disappeared from English around the 14th century when it was supplanted by uu, which ultimately developed into the modern w.
Yogh disappeared around the 15th century and was typically replaced by gh.
The letters u and j, as distinct from v and i, were introduced in the 16th century, and w assumed the status of an independent letter, so that the English alphabet is now considered to consist of the following 26 letters:
These are the Majuscule form, aka upper case or Caps:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
And these are the Minuscule form, aka lower case or small letters:
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
There are no diacritic letters in the Modern English alphbet. Although a few exceptions are made when a word is borrowed from another language as loan-words, such as naïve and façade.
In time, these characters disappear and they become normal characters from the normal 26 characters as listed above.
MvdV> Björn already pointed out the currency sign for the Pound MvdV> Sterling: £. x9C in CP850, xA3 in Latin 1 and codepoint U+00A3 in MvdV> Unicode.
As can be seen, it doesn't appear to translate as easily as he makes it seem. The English Pound Sterling sign £ (0x8C) doesn't appear on any QWERTY keyboard, but it can be found in a Windows character map of DOS characters as used in America. The same is also true of the American currency symbol, although it is found on a QWERTY American keyboard.
MvdV> Characters with a diaresis ARE used in English."Naïve" was already MvdV> mentioned.
Since Naïve (0x8B) is a borrowed French word, it can be spelled both ways and be correct. In English, the diaresis is usually dropped and a regular i (0x69) is used.
MvdV> It is often written as "naive" in US English, but that MvdV> does not mean the version with the i with diaresis is incorrect.
But it does indicate that someone is using the borrowed word to indicate that it is borrowed from the French and doesn't know the difference. However it is spelled, the meaning remains the same.
MvdV> English also allows the diaresis in names. Noël Coward was already MvdV> mentioned. I add Emily Brontë.
An acute, grave or diaeresis may also be placed over an 'e' at the end of a word to indicate that it is not silent, as in saké. However, these devices are often not used even where they would serve to alleviate some degree of confusion.
MvdV> Sidenote: All those pages on wikipedia are encoded in UTF-8
The only way to use both foriegn and English languages with the characters not 'bleeped' out, such as the ö in Bjorn as it is usually found here ... else, there would be a grave misspelling of Björn as in: Bjoern or Bj├╢rn ... which translates to Bjerk on some monitors, when the translation table used to display Bjorn isn't using a Western European, extra letter alphabet table...
R\%/itt - K5RXT
Reminder: "On Friday September 8th 2006, Mike Godwin's 16 year experiment was concluded and Godwin's Law was officially repealed by a MAJORITY vote among millions of individuals." http://repealgodwin.tripod.com/
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