Language change proposal

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

Joachim Durchholz <joachim.durchholz@REDACTED> wrote:
	The software that displays Unicode is supposed to do that for you.
	Actually there are issues that I haven't seen properly handled yet; for 
	example, one Far-East script (Indonesian IIRC) has glyphs that /go 
	around/ their neighbouring glyph.

Indonesian can be written in ASCII.  He may be thinking of some Indic script.

	I don't, too - but why use Unicode if you're writing in English anyway? 

Because quite a lot of the characters you want for writing English
are not available in ASCII, most obviously, but not limited to,
the 6..9 66..99 quotation marks (and NO, '..' ".." are *NOT* adequate
substitutes).  I can't even write my father's name in ASCII.

Not to mention the fact that this country has two official languages,
and one of them requires letters that are not available even in ISO Latin 1.
I can't even write the name of my University in Latin 1, far less ASCII.

	Agreed.
	Though the Russians tend to manage somehow - I've been seeing a lot of 
	Russion software lately.
	Actually, all the non-Western languages have ways of transliterating to 
	Western script. AFAIK there are even several schemes to choose from for 
	any such language.
	
Note that many such transliteration schemes use diacritical marks,
which means that they don't map to ASCII, and may have trouble mapping
to Latin 1.  The whole reason that Unicode has three alphabetic cases
is to support a historic Cyrillic->Latin transliteration scheme.