LINGUIST List 6.437

Sun 26 Mar 1995

FYI: 8-bit characters, Inofficial e-texts, Elvis in Latin

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Jose R. Alvarez (LUZ, 8-bit characters
2. Francisco Javier Martinez Garcia, inofficial e-texts
3. "B. Robert Helm", Re: Elvis

Dear fellow linguists:
 In the past months I have read several postings to this list using
languages other than English (Spanish, German, French, Finnish, Italian,
etc.). I consider this situation absolutely delicious, as it adds that
international flavour that our discipline is so proud of. As English is
not my native tongue, I welcome and exercise my right to use my language
in all contexts. However, the notorious difficulty that 8-bit characters
have to travel in the cyberspace has made it really hard to send texts
that comply with the spelling conventions of these languages (basically
accented and umlauted vowels, Greek letters and certain other symbols).
This is not a big problem when you are just sending a relatively short
e-message to a colleague who speaks the same language (you just drop the
accents and type plain vowels or capitals instead, for enye you type a
plain "n", etc.). The real trouble arises when you wish to send a more
polished document such as a paper, an abstract, a conference posting, a
bibliography, a draft of a thesis to a distant supervisor, etc. In most
of these cases the spelling norms *are* crucial. The obvious solution is
the coding of 8-bit characters as sequences of 7-bit characters. I think
that this has become a common practice, but I don't know whether there
is a standard for these conversions. If this coding practice has not yet
been the object of standardisation, I venture to propose one below. This
proposal refers to the characters available in the Extended Character
Set on IBM PC-compatible computers (I am not familiar with Mac, but this
could also be used in that system). I would like to stress the fact that
it is not necessary to type the (long) document using the coding system,
rather the file must typed as usual, with accented and umlauted vowels
as well as the rest of the characters needed in the language, and just
after that you make a copy of the file and on that copy you change the
8-bit characters for 7-bit sequences according to the table provided.
This procedure is *not* manual, for this you use the search-and-replace
facility normally available in your word processor or editor (remember:
the DOS editor has it). This can be done for most languages in ten or
fewer passes (less than one minute, varying with the size of the file).
It is important to let the recipient know that you have coded the file
in this fashion. Append a note at the beginnig of the document to that
effect, with a suggestion to use the search-and-replace facility to make
the reverse changes, as well as the table of changes and samples. Feel
free to edit (and/or translate) what follows if you wish to make the
note shorter by including only what is pertinent for a given language.

|
A. MODEL OF A NOTE:

There is a Project since 1985, which intends to collect all works of
Indo-European Languages.

 -------------------------
"Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text- und Sprachmaterialien"
 (TITUS)

Vorliegende und in Bearbeitung befindliche Texte
(vorl ufige Liste: Stand 26. Januar 1995)
...............

A) alt-, mittel- und neuindisch:
 a) vedisch:
 Rgveda-Sa~hit~: Eingabe unter der Leitung von W.P. Lehmann (Austin, Texas)
 durch H.S.
 Ananthanarayana (Hyderabad); berarbeitungen durch S.D. Atkins (Pomona,
 California), G.E.

Editorial note
 In order to cut this message short we have made the complete list of
 electronic texts available at the listserver under the title

 ETEXTS txt

To retrieve it send the message:
 get ETEXTS txt linguist
to
 listservtamvm1.tamu.edu (Internet) or listservtamvm1 (Bitnet)

For more information, please contact:

 Prof.Dr. Jost Gippert, Universit t Frankfurt, Postfach 11 19 32, D-60054
 Frankfurt
 Tel.: +49-69-798 8591 oder 3139; Fax: +49-69-798 2873; e-mail:
 gippertem.uni-frankfurt.d400.de


=======================================================================
 Dr. Fco. Javier Mart!nez Garc!a

 Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft | tel. +49- 69- 798 2847
 Universit t Frankfurt | (sekr.) +49- 69- 798 3139
 Postfach 11 19 32 | fax. +49- 69- 798 2873
 D-60054 Frankfurt | martinezem.uni-frankfurt.d400.de
=======================================================================

The Associated Press news agency recently reported that Doctor Jukka
Ammondt and the Finnish Broadcast Corporation Choir released a compact
disk of songs by Elvis Presley in Latin. The article said that Doctor
Ammondt had also made an earlier CD of tangos, also in Latin. Since
that news article appeared, several persons (including myself) have
sent messages to the Internet LATIN-L mailing list, and to the
Internet newsgroup sci.classics, asking to buy one or both of these
CD's.

I forwarded some of these messages to Doctor Ammondt, asking how to
get the CD's. The relevant parts of his reply appear below.

Rob Helm

 From: Jukka Ammondt, University of Jyvska:la:, Finland

... I have been happily surprised of the interest towards my
CD's and, of course, willing to deliver them to those who are
interested in it. The problem is, my producer doesn't have
connections abroad, and that means that there's no channels for us to
sell the records worldwide -- not yet, anyway. Please contact
directly my producer (fax below) to order the CD's by post. By the
way, I would be extremely happy if you could give me information about
someone who could organize selling of the records. I don't know whom
to contact in this business...The fax of my producer:

 Stop Records, Finland.
 358-41-666773


...Information about the CD's is:
1) Doctor Ammondt, Tango Triste Finnicum, 1993. Contains six (6)
Finnish traditional tangos in Latin.
2) Doctor Ammondt, The Legend Lives Forever in Latin, 1995. Contains
seven (7) songs in Latin, six of them made known by Elvis Presley and
one with lyrics by the singer.