Re: A question on writing/typing

Axiem wrote:
>
> Uh..yeah, Well I'm new to this list, and also have only one ConLang
> (more ArtLang) that I have..(that being the one I'm asking about)...The
> language (Called Dimel in English) has an alphabet of 36 characters (4
> of which are just other letters with an accent), the alphabet is mainly
> drawn from the English and Greek alphabets, and I know how to write it
> freehand, and I set up macros for the 'special' chars in Word, however,
> how would I be able to represent these chars with a normal ASCII set
> used between mail, and also for HTML on my webpage on it (which I
> haven't quite otten around to yet)...and are there any ideas on how to
> go around doing this? Any help would be appreciated ^_^
>
        First of all, welcome to the list (wow! three newcomers in less than a
week, that's a lot!).

        About writing your language in e-mail, it is going to be difficult
enough because of the 7-bit ASCII that most of us can only read,
especially if you use Greek letters with Latin letters. For the accented
letters, the best way is to keep them, but putting the accent after the
letter (e-acute becomes e' for instance). For the Greek letters, there
is no easy way to represent them. Maybe you can use a special
diacritical mark after the letter (like a colon or something like that)
and warning that a letter followed by it must be taken as its greek
equivalent. Or, if your script makes no difference between lower- and
upper-case letters, using in e-mail lower-case letters for Latin letters
and upper-case letters for Greek letters. Or you can try to create your
own chart of correspondence between your script and the 7-bit ASCII of
e-mail, and explaining it when needed. In this case, you can use
everything, even the numbers, as do Greek people when sending mails in
Greek (my Greek housemate told me that when sending posts in Greek, she
used 8 to represent the theta, n to represent eta, v to represent nu, 3
to represent epsilon, etc...).

        Well, anyway, those are only ideas for you to begin. Do what you like
best.

> -Axiem
> -axiem@swbell.net
--
        Christophe Grandsire

        Philips Research Laboratories --  Building WB 145
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