Hello Maurice!

23 Feb 17 13:17, you wrote to me:

 KvE>> As far as I have noticed the Danes are dumbing down their
 KvE>> notations to 7 bit characters.

 MK> Do you mean like ISO-646 for Danish/Norwegian?  That has been around for a
 MK> long, long time now.  In Canada there are two versions, one for English
 MK> and the other for French.  I seriously doubt anyone uses either anymore if
 MK> indeed either got any serious usage other than perhaps some silly gov't
 MK> department(s).

 I took a shortcut in my wording, I meant to say that in publik signs for
 e.g. city names, the start using the 26 character alphabeth, without the
 umlauts, little o over the A, slashed O's or connected ae's.

 Aabenraa or Åbenrå

 But after looking at the internet, I seem mistaken.  Aabenraa seems to be the
 local notation, Åbenrå the preferred notation by the language board.

 I can type the first notation with any typewriter, the second needs a special
 version.

 Neither notation helps me with the proper pronunciation.

 MK> Here is an interesting thought; What about the signage of Birobidzhan
 MK> (Биробиджан)?  What 7 or 8 bit encoding will cover Russian and
 MK> Yiddish which are the most likely used and supported languages of that
 MK> city?  As far as I know it is one of the few places on this earth where
 MK> Yiddish is still being officailly supported.  Please don't quote me on
 MK> that as I don't know for sure and am only speculating.

 However you write it I cannot pronounce it and I cannot look for it in an
 index of a Atlas. In every language there is or may be an official way to
 translate these names. We would write Birobidzjan. For Paris we say Parijs,
 Berlin is written and pronounced as Berlijn. etc.

 MK> As for the Danes and 7 bit encodings I doubt they'll succeed
 MK> internationally with that crippled idea.

 It was my impression, certainly not official.

 MK> The Russians have a better shot
 MK> at it with their CP866 crippleware albiet they threw in an extra bit.

 If it suits them to make hardware with limited possibilities usefull to them,
 then that is a way to do it. Make the smallest common denominator for all
 languages and gliphs creates a behemoth with most of it never used.
 That may be no problem with memory and available processing power, but it
 was from were we came from, when saving bits was the norm.

Kees

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