RE: China

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

On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, C C Magnus Gustavsson wrote:

> No. On the contrary, I don't know about a single language that pronounce
> u-umlaut as "ue".

Just to get things completely clear, I'll give you an example as well:

Imagine another world, in which Fooish is a common language. The Fooish
alphabet contains 23 characters, all those used in English except "b", "d"
and "g". Fooish is used as the base of FSCII.

Now imagine that your computers use only FSCII and you want to send the
following message to a friend: "How about a beer after work?".

Since "p", "t" and "k" are the unvoiced equivalents to "b", "d" and "g" it
seems natural to send "How apout a peer after work?". The risk for 
misunderstandings is obvious though.

So, what do you do? Since "pk", "tk" and "kk" are not used in any English
words (I hope ;-) ) you could introduce the convention that when you send 
"How apkout a pkeer after work?" to your friend he will know that in this 
case you're refering to a "beer" and not to a "peer".

Havinkk reatk a few sentences like these you kket usetk to it. It thoesn't
have anythinkk to tko with "b" pkeinkk pronouncetk as or equivalent to 
"pk" thoukkh antk in a motkern worltk that's not limitetk to FSCII there's
no lonkker any reason to use the convention.

If there's no need to use the above convention to avoid misunderstandings
(i e when writing English names in Fooish text with only Fooish letters)
it's better to refer to "mr Traper" than "mr Tkraper".

/Makknus