Scripts (continued)

[Luis Gonzalez-Reimann]

>        Now my other point was: is that really so difficult for the
>computer industry to respect other cultural points of view than the
>anglo-saxon one or is it just bad will? Consider this: there are some email
>addresses inside our University's LAN I can't write to in correct french
>because the gateways (Unix based?) do not allow french accentuation (and we
>are in the heart of the Swiss french-speaking aera). Ridiculous...
>       I think the computer industry now has to make a big effort of
>reflection on this point or do we (indologists, french-, german-, hindi-,
>japanese- etc  speakers) have to do it for them and work on matters that
>are actually not our primary task?


>Francois Voegeli
>Fac. des lettres
>Section de langues et civilisations orientales
>Universite de Lausanne
>BFSH 2
>CH-1015


I think it was just plain lack of foresight, together with the absence of a
more global perspective, something that, historically, is very common in
whatever country is a world power at any given moment (whether it be Spain,
France, Britain, the U.S., or any other country).  As the ground work for
the personal computers we use today was laid in the United States, those who
did it where not thinking beyond the needs of the English language.
As a native speaker of Spanish, I always found it ridiculous that something
that is so simple on a typewriter, namely writing accents, or adding a dot
above or below a letter, becomes an impossible task on a desktop computer.
I learned from a computer-literate friend of mine that the reason has to do
with how the ASCII characters were initially established, and that, at this
point, changing them would be too complicated.  So we need to rely on
specially designed fonts.

Could someone else throw more light on this?


Luis Gonzalez-Reimann
Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies
University of California, Berkeley