On 09/08/2007, at 3:58 PM, Christian Perrier wrote:
Do you think that finding such a "mapping" for non-latin languages italso possible? What about all Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, etc. - basedlanguages?Even for Latin languages.... French does not have such mapping system for its accented characters. And I would bet that several other Latin languages don't either. Indeed, among the Latin-based languages I know about and where non ASCII characters are meaningful (and not only there to show the tonal accent),
Um, Christian, the tonal accents are meaningful, at least in Vietnamese. They actually distinguish meaning. Words with the same letters but different tonal accents have different meanings.
only German uses such as complete mapping system for its umlauts and "ss". I actually feel somewhat the same than Damyan. Working the issue around is probably the best way to...hide it under the rug
Solving the issue is far preferable. Inaccurate accents in my language would make it unreadable.
It's actually a challenge for students, to give them a piece of text in Vietnamese which has no accents, and ask them to predict from possible context which accents should be used. It makes reading a puzzle, rather than a straight-forward process.
from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN
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