Re: OT: Apologies (was Re: OT: NATLANG: Romanian orthography question)

On Thu, Nov 27, 2003 at 08:35:17AM +0200, Isaac Penzev wrote:
> Adam Walker scripsit:
>
> > I enjoied it very much.  I had no idea that Romanian
> > (even when written in Cirilic0 had so many N-tildes
> > and barred-D's.  It is a truely peculiar orthography.
>
> Mark J. Reed scripsit:
> > Didn't quite make it through, no doubt due to our friendly neighborhood
> > mailing list server.
>
> I'm deadly sorry for the mess I've caused by sending a UTF-8 message to the
> List. It seems it is even more cruel to Cyrillics than it was to
> the Georgian ;)
No, it wasn't that cruel.  The only problem was with the yer's; everything
else made it through fine.  But thanks to the munging of the yers, it wasn't
completely legal UTF-8, and therefore some programs might refuse to display
it completely, or render it as Latin-1 instead.  The Latin-1 treatment -
whether due to the corruption or just because the mailer doesn't handle
Unicode at all - is what results in the capital N-tildes and barred D's.

> I give up sending anything Unicoded to our dear List. I'll resend the Ancient
> Romanian message here in 1251 (Win Cyr), and/or to the Romconlang in UTF-8
> (Yahoo is more friendly to encodings), if it is necessary.
I'm not sure Windows Cyrillic (or KOI8-R) would be any less subject to
corruption by the mail server than UTF-8 is.  It depends on whether it uses
one of (apparently) two particular byte values anywhere (namely
0x8A=138 decimal and 0xA0=160 decimal).  ISO-8859-5 would probably work
fine, since those two bytes are just an unused control code and a non-breaking
space in all the ISO-8859-X character sets.


> > How can k + hard sign be a complete word?
>
> It is indeed a yer (tvërdyj znak). I think it was used the same way it does in
> Bulgarian: to denote [7].
Ah.  I didn't know that the hard sign used to represent the Slavic yer,
or that it was used to represent a vowel in other languages.  Thanks for
the info!


-Mark

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