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German somewhat has (e.g., you write "ue" instead of "ü", "ss" for "ß", as in "suess"), but Spanish certainly hasn't. Saying that Spanish can be written in us-a

by afc 5y ago

German somewhat has (e.g., you write "ue" instead of "ü", "ss" for "ß", as in "suess"), but Spanish certainly hasn't. Saying that Spanish can be written in us-ascii is about the same as saying that English could cope if you removed the h and the y — it would still be understandable, right? Us-ascii Spanish "?d'onde est'a la biblioteca?" is as pleasant as, uh, "w^ere is t^e librarv?" I agree with most of this article but, as a Spanish, German and Italian speaker, you can bet I'll refuse to write in an unnecessarily crippled and incorrect version of these languages; I'm very grateful for Unicode.

emteycz 5y ago
Don't get me wrong, I think these languages shouldn't be crippled too. However, I also think that contexts such as system log messages should be in English.
- kkfx 5y ago
  Why not in Greek? Why not in Serbian (with Cyrillic alphabet)? Why not in Hangul (South Korea)? Why not in Japanese (in all their three alphabets)? If you want an easy international language, that's why we (humans) invented many years ago the concept of international auxiliary languages, Esperanto as the oldest/most known but various others exists. That's the SOLE way to have their own mother language and a secondary language for "any nation" that does not give advantages to any nation (so far English is the global language just because they were the winner of the last big world war, before was French etc) and so can be accepted by anyone. Remember the principle of communicating vessels, no matter the present global situation, if it's not egalitarian than sooner or later will be weaponized and things change. If really neutral and useful it might survive. The Swiss choose Latin as a symbolical neutral language, we might do something better for something less symbolic but much more important in practice...
MarcusE1W 5y ago
The work arounds in German exist, but they are rarely used and look extremely inelegant. Even before smartphones with virtual keyboards became common many people preferred to press a few extra keys in their SMS to get the correct Umlaut than to write ue, ae, oe, ..

by afc 5y ago

emteycz 5y ago

Don't get me wrong, I think these languages shouldn't be crippled too. However, I also think that contexts such as system log messages should be in English.

kkfx 5y ago
Why not in Greek? Why not in Serbian (with Cyrillic alphabet)? Why not in Hangul (South Korea)? Why not in Japanese (in all their three alphabets)? If you want an easy international language, that's why we (humans) invented many years ago the concept of international auxiliary languages, Esperanto as the oldest/most known but various others exists. That's the SOLE way to have their own mother language and a secondary language for "any nation" that does not give advantages to any nation (so far English is the global language just because they were the winner of the last big world war, before was French etc) and so can be accepted by anyone. Remember the principle of communicating vessels, no matter the present global situation, if it's not egalitarian than sooner or later will be weaponized and things change. If really neutral and useful it might survive. The Swiss choose Latin as a symbolical neutral language, we might do something better for something less symbolic but much more important in practice...

MarcusE1W 5y ago

The work arounds in German exist, but they are rarely used and look extremely inelegant. Even before smartphones with virtual keyboards became common many people preferred to press a few extra keys in their SMS to get the correct Umlaut than to write ue, ae, oe, ..