LINGUIST List 5.89

Wed 26 Jan 1994

Disc: Lingua franca on the Internet

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1. , Re: 5.71 Lingua franca on the Internet
2. "ROBERT D. LUBBERS", RE: 5.71 Lingua franca on the Internet

Message 1: Re: 5.71 Lingua franca on the Internet

I do hope I'm not out of line in observing this, but it's begging to be
commented upon. Celso Alvarez-Caccamo, in Linguist Issue #5.71,
remarks:

>I quite honestly don't feel I'm now writing in "English," not even
>in "bad English": I'm writing in "Computer."

While I believe I understand his point, to me the designator "Computer"
refers to a specialized sublanguage of English, one in which I have
been competent for nearly ten years. Given this overlap of
terminology, this claim seems quite humorous when juxtaposed with the
portion of his text immediately preceding it:

>Within [the Internet's] linear territory, discussants discursively
>manage locally-bound hegemonic or subaltern positions. . . .

Certainly, nothing in "Computer" has prepared me to understand this!
I have to switch to "Linguist", where I find that perhaps I require
further competency in the sub-sublanguage "Sociolinguist". (I would
agree, by the way, that it isn't "English".) :-)

Marion Kee Internet: <keecs.cmu.edu>
Center for Machine Translation
Cargnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA USA

Message 2: RE: 5.71 Lingua franca on the Internet

Please. There is a non-ASCII character representation system called UNICODE
which is a 16-bit representation system capable of displaying all of the
characters in the major alphabets/syllabaries/ideogram systems of the world;
i.e. Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Korean, Han Chinese (1/3 of the
characters are Han ideograms) Devanagari (?) Amharic, and many others too num-
erous to mention. There will be a major effort underway to support this new
standard, but as of yet, only Windows NT seems to be taking it seriously, with
Unix/X Windows in tow.

1) What effect do you all believe this would have on international communication
 by computer? If you use a non-Latin script, would you personally abandon
 an ASCII (i.e. Roman) representation/misrepresentation of a message in
 your native alphabet to send messages in your native script? Would this make
 it more likely for you to send messages in your native language, rather than
 in Englsh?

2) Does anybody know more about UNICODE? Any applications yet? Where is the
 documentation? Who is doing the standardization?

Comments/flames/pointers to

Robert Lubbers
Florida International University
BITNET lubbersservax
INTERNET lubbersrsolix.fiu.edu