Re: [idn] UTF-8 / RACE

[C C Magnus Gustavsson <mag@lysator.liu.se>]

On Tue, 29 May 2001, Adam M. Costello wrote:

> I agree that there "should" be no problems, but there will be.  In my
> experience, copying text with the mouse usually gives you exactly what
> is displayed; very rarely does the application intercept the operation,
> because it's usually being handled entirely by the GUI library.

It's not the graphics but the encoded characters that are copied. If a
characters is available in the fonts does not make a difference.


> It's not obvious to me.  Someone (Keith?) mentioned archived mail.
> Should those addresses arbitrarily stop working someday?

They should not be archived as ACE in the first place. If they are,
they should be converted whenever possible.


> <offtopic> I rarely hear the phrase "English alphabet".  When I do, I
> think to myself, "There is no English alphabet.  English uses the Roman
> alphabet."  The phrase "Roman alphabet" is the more common name for the
> letters A-Z.  "English alphabet" sounds arrogant to me, since England
> merely inherited the alphabet from the Roman empire.  The most formally
> correct phrase might be "modern Roman alphabet". </offtopic>

I'm very sorry for keeping this off topic a little while longer but I
feel that statements as wrong as this should be corrected.

No, English does not use the Roman (or Latin) alphabet. English uses
an alphabet based on the Latin alphabet but so does numerous other
languages, each with a different set of characters. The Latin alphabet
contains 14 consonants (bcdfghlmnpqrst) and 5 vowels (aeiou). (It
might be argued that it's actually 16 consonants if we choose to count
j and v as separate letters from i and u, which the Romans did not.)

It might be that the phrase "Roman alphabet" is commonly used for the 
letters A-Z in the USA, but if so it's historically incorrect since
that is not the alphabet the Romans used. England did not only inherit
it's alphabet. It inherited it's language as well (although not from
Latin) and it evolved with time. Yet we call it the English language
to separate it from e g the related French and German languages. 

If anything is arrogant, it's using the term "modern Roman alphabet"
for the English alphabet. What makes it more modern or more Roman than
any of the other alphabets based on the Latin (e g the German)?

I suppose you don't believe me so to make sure I quote from my copy of
the Oxford Latin Dictionary (page v): "The Latin alphabet contains
fifteen consonants" and "It contains five vowels".

(They count v but not j as a separate character. I quote (page iii):
"While the letter 'i' is both a vowel and a consonant and thus there
is no 'j' in Latin, it unfortunately still appears necessary to make a
distinction between 'u' as a vowel (as in English) and as a consonant,
the latter being given as 'v'. This is unhistorical and philologically
unsound and it is hoped that before too long the letter 'v' can be
eradicated from this dictionary.")


Nosce te Latinum.

Now, can we please leave this topic?

/Magnus