questions & comments

[Rebecca and Rowland]

At 7:49 am -0400 8/7/98, Hilmar Schlegel wrote:
>Thierry Bouche wrote:
[snip]

>It would be worth to have a look in British phone books to see what
>their attitude is. If they follow the American practice I'd say it is a
>bad attitude not to follow the continental usage.

I think you'll find that British phone directories aren't following
American practice when they leave out accents.  I'm not *sure* that accents
aren't used in phone directories here, but I don't recall seeing any
accents in a phone directory, and I've just looked and failed to find any
(although Bolton in Lancashire where I am at the moment isn't the most
cosmopolitan part of the country.  It does have rather a lot of people from
the Indian subcontinent, but Urdu names transliterated into English seem to
avoid accents anyway.

>It is the old discussion about proper names and how far one can use
>"original" writing and fonts from a foreign alphabet. I think that we
>have to become more flexible here to avoid to end up all in plain
>English one day.

Good on yer.

> The development in font technology allows this at least
>by increasing flexibility.
>
>If proper English requires not to use sz, then please use s-long s-final
>instead - or is this forbidden???? ;-)

Not so much forbidden as impossible.  Where on Earth am I going to get a
long s from?  Or do you seriously expect me to use Yannis Fraktur all the
time ;-)

>BTW, exactly according the same dogma the new German spelling reform
>implies the revival of the long s and its need in every font...

Can you say more about this?

[snip]

Rowland.