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In early 2000s Estonia, I remember people using numbers to denote certain accented characters when texting: õ - 6 ä - 2 ö - 8 ü - y
by 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 agoArabic 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 agoThe trouble comes up when an Arab needs to communicate with an Estonian verbally. How do they spell their names to each other?
- iforgotpassword 3y agoI think it could lead to an accidental diffie helman key exchange.
- dathinab 3y agoin 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 agoThe 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 agoAfter learning that ß is the ligature of literally "sz", I am astounded that "ss" is used instead to replace ß.