4 ms·

In the early 90's me and a couple of other French guys had taken to writing French unaccented, so that we wouldn't suffer the daily pain of character set proble

In the early 90's me and a couple of other French guys had taken to writing French unaccented, so that we wouldn't suffer the daily pain of character set problems - we really bashed our own heads to fit into lower ASCII !

Zanfa 3y ago
In early 2000s Estonia, I remember people using numbers to denote certain accented characters when texting: õ - 6 ä - 2 ö - 8 ü - y
- buchoo 3y ago
  Arabic speakers have a comparable system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet#Comparison_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet#Compariso...
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    The trouble comes up when an Arab needs to communicate with an Estonian verbally. How do they spell their names to each other?
    - iforgotpassword 3y ago
      I think it could lead to an accidental diffie helman key exchange.
- dathinab 3y ago
  in German there is an official convention for the non us-ascii letters, AFIK it predates computers and is rooted in germanic dialects developing differently and later stuff like non-german specific type writers, printing press machines, etc. ä => ae ö => oe ü => ue ß => ss but one gotcha is that it's a fuzzy one way trip, some words, especially city names, can have a ae,oe,ue in their correct native spelling. Worse ss is a normal language building block in German which is pronounced differently then ß so writing it as ss is quite confusing for anyone which doesn't happen to know that it's correct spelling is with ß. To top that of some cases of ß spelling have officially changed to ss spelling over time due to people anyway pronouncing it more like a ss and getting it wrong all the time. And to some degree ß is semi-official abandoned by now.
  - Attrecomet 3y ago
    The letters ß and ss are pronounced exactly the same, a hard 's' sound. Their effect on the preceding sounds is slightly different, though -- 'ss' makes the vowel short, 'ß' keeps it long. In all, a rather minute difference.
  - mxmlnkn 3y ago
    After learning that ß is the ligature of literally "sz", I am astounded that "ss" is used instead to replace ß.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
Same here in Poland. I got used to skipping the diacritics, and quickly learned to mentally decode text that was rendered with the wrong code page. And maybe this is a form of Stockholm syndrome, but to this day, I don't really mind sticking to lower ASCII - it just makes things easier (or at least until recently it did), and I don't really care about that '³' in my surname. Sorry, I meant 'ł'. Possibly related to that: - I always stick to US English language when using software, even if it offers Polish, because I don't trust translations. They're usually done by people who don't have enough context and knowledge to do it right. I've been burned too many times by this. Plus, localized error messages hinder searching for solutions. - I wouldn't mind if everyone switched to English[0] as first language and called it a day; there would be tremendous economic and social benefits from that to everyone, far outweighing the loss of a little bit of cultural variety/noise. - I'm strongly in favor of meeting machines half-way. LLMs aside, it's trivial for people to learn a small controlled vocabulary here and there (like e.g. "OR" and "AND" and quotes in search queries), allowing to make interfaces vastly more predictable, reliable and comprehensible. -- [0] - Or French, or Chinese, or Swahili, neither of which I know - to stave off the usual replies of the "you only want it because you already know English" kind.
- rolisz 3y ago
  I guess Polish people had it worse than Romanians and Hungarians. All our accents are simple to strip away and they still kinda sound like the base letter. But I agree with you: I don't trust translations and I think the benefits from humans using a single language would be amazing.
- wink 3y ago
  The funny thing to me is how these inofficial transcription rules differ from country to country. Seems most people with ö or ü from a Turkish name are happy to drop it to o and u (cf Mesut Özil) but Germans are absolutely not. (Not saying this is a rule, just what I observed.)
  - snowpid 3y ago
    In certain situations like cross word puzzle it wasnt usual to use "umlaut" but instead to write oe, ue and ae. In Swiss German people dont use ß. So transcription was always a thing to know.

Zanfa 3y ago

In early 2000s Estonia, I remember people using numbers to denote certain accented characters when texting: õ - 6 ä - 2 ö - 8 ü - y

buchoo 3y ago
Arabic speakers have a comparable system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet#Comparison_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet#Compariso...
- HPsquared 3y ago
  The trouble comes up when an Arab needs to communicate with an Estonian verbally. How do they spell their names to each other?
  - iforgotpassword 3y ago
    I think it could lead to an accidental diffie helman key exchange.
dathinab 3y ago
in German there is an official convention for the non us-ascii letters, AFIK it predates computers and is rooted in germanic dialects developing differently and later stuff like non-german specific type writers, printing press machines, etc. ä => ae ö => oe ü => ue ß => ss but one gotcha is that it's a fuzzy one way trip, some words, especially city names, can have a ae,oe,ue in their correct native spelling. Worse ss is a normal language building block in German which is pronounced differently then ß so writing it as ss is quite confusing for anyone which doesn't happen to know that it's correct spelling is with ß. To top that of some cases of ß spelling have officially changed to ss spelling over time due to people anyway pronouncing it more like a ss and getting it wrong all the time. And to some degree ß is semi-official abandoned by now.
- Attrecomet 3y ago
  The letters ß and ss are pronounced exactly the same, a hard 's' sound. Their effect on the preceding sounds is slightly different, though -- 'ss' makes the vowel short, 'ß' keeps it long. In all, a rather minute difference.
- mxmlnkn 3y ago
  After learning that ß is the ligature of literally "sz", I am astounded that "ss" is used instead to replace ß.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

Same here in Poland. I got used to skipping the diacritics, and quickly learned to mentally decode text that was rendered with the wrong code page. And maybe this is a form of Stockholm syndrome, but to this day, I don't really mind sticking to lower ASCII - it just makes things easier (or at least until recently it did), and I don't really care about that '³' in my surname. Sorry, I meant 'ł'. Possibly related to that: - I always stick to US English language when using software, even if it offers Polish, because I don't trust translations. They're usually done by people who don't have enough context and knowledge to do it right. I've been burned too many times by this. Plus, localized error messages hinder searching for solutions. - I wouldn't mind if everyone switched to English[0] as first language and called it a day; there would be tremendous economic and social benefits from that to everyone, far outweighing the loss of a little bit of cultural variety/noise. - I'm strongly in favor of meeting machines half-way. LLMs aside, it's trivial for people to learn a small controlled vocabulary here and there (like e.g. "OR" and "AND" and quotes in search queries), allowing to make interfaces vastly more predictable, reliable and comprehensible. -- [0] - Or French, or Chinese, or Swahili, neither of which I know - to stave off the usual replies of the "you only want it because you already know English" kind.

rolisz 3y ago
I guess Polish people had it worse than Romanians and Hungarians. All our accents are simple to strip away and they still kinda sound like the base letter. But I agree with you: I don't trust translations and I think the benefits from humans using a single language would be amazing.
wink 3y ago
The funny thing to me is how these inofficial transcription rules differ from country to country. Seems most people with ö or ü from a Turkish name are happy to drop it to o and u (cf Mesut Özil) but Germans are absolutely not. (Not saying this is a rule, just what I observed.)
- snowpid 3y ago
  In certain situations like cross word puzzle it wasnt usual to use "umlaut" but instead to write oe, ue and ae. In Swiss German people dont use ß. So transcription was always a thing to know.