Text 25007, 55 rader
Skriven 2006-02-08 13:08:03 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
  Kommentar till text 24925 av Dale Shipp (1:261/1466.0)
Ärende: Texas Grapefruit GRE
============================
 MVDV>> You don't get the *local* news in English. Not here, not in Thailand.
 >
 >    We got local news in English when we visited our son in
 > Germany. That is how we found out about the deadlock in the German
 > election (now resolved via a grand coalition).

The German election affected far more than just Germany so that wasn't local
news, hat was European news.

 MVDV>> Actually one can do reasonably well without umlauts and accents in
 MVDV>> Dutch.  They aren't used very much anyway and one can usually just
 MVDV>> omit them without harming comprehension. There are a few
 MVDV>> exeptions such as één and een. ("one" resp, "a") In the
 MVDV>> time when moderators went into a flat spinover "high ascii"
 MVDV>> we simply wrote e1n instead of één when it mattered. The
 MVDV>> SMS gang has now adopted that custom.

 >    By SMS, do you mean Short Message Service?

Yep, the one that is embedded in the GSM system.

 > If so, they seem to really do a lot of things to the language
 > in the interest of shortening messages

We did the same when modems were limited to 300 Bps.

 > to the minimum number of key strokes on a telephone keypad.

Not just that. An SMS is limited to 254 characters. So you have to be sparingly
to compres what you want to say in one message.

 > Personally, I don't see how they can do it:-}}

Practise, lots of practise. ;-)

 >    The "high ascii" character prohibition by some moderators
 > stems from their reading ECHOPOL1.

That was were it was formally put down.

 > It lists them as being prohibited. IMO, without good cause

On the contrary. At the time of inception of EP1, there were good reasons for
banning extended characters. There was software (and hardware!) around that
could not handle it and that displayed various kind of undesirable side
effects.

Of course that was over fifteen years ago and times have changed. Today there
is no reason for a general ban on high ascii any more.


Cheers, Michiel

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