Nicholas Bodley wrote:

>
> On Fri, 25 Mar 2005 19:09:09 -0500, Peter T. Daniels
> <grammatim@...> wrote:
>
> > I have no idea what you're talking about. Nicholas began a discussion of
> > ...
>
> > ... i18n, which means nothing to me
>
> I'm, well, astonished. Apparently you are not involved at all in any work
> on making computers work with other writing systems. I guess that's fair,

Why should I be? That is work for computer people.

> and perhaps understandable, considering recent discussions. It also seems
> believable that you don't read at all, or very little, on that topic. I
> guess that's fair, too. Lots of people could be so described.

Why should I? Computers aren't intrinsically interesting.

> Sooner or later, one will find, well into adulthood, that one has not
> learned some specific thing that almost everybody else knows. ("Misled",
> anyone?)
>
> OK, the word "internationalization" is long and a nuisance to type often.
> That word has 20 letters. Combining whimsy and practicality, as I see it,
> the embedded "18" represents the 18 letters that are not typed. L10n (l

From the point of view of writing systems, that's an incredibly stupid
abbreviation (and, obviously, totally opaque). From the point of view of
languages, as well -- a standard example of the sort of rule that's
"impossible" is any rule that involves _counting_ segments or morphemes
or words.

As a guess, "internationalization" sounds like it might be what Apple
called "localization" in its technical manual many years ago, about how
to get computers to work in languages other than English?

> ocali zatio n) and (only recently?), g11n (g lobal i zatio n) also show up
> sometimes. (I split the words to make counting easier.) Split: i ntern
> ation aliza tio n (Egad! I thought modern automatic hyphenation,
> *anywhere* in a word, was bad. This splitting by five letters (max.) looks
> even worse!)

Again, doing things by counting is bizarre.

> I have heard that DEC (Digital Eqpt. Corp.), long before the merger, had
> developed a very good hyphenation system. They also developed an excellent
> speech synthesizer, so good that the remaining discrepancy was slightly
> inappropriate emotional content.
>
> I think, btw, that Tex Texin is "i18n guy". (Is he still reading Qalam? I
> remember some very pleasant messages from him a while back.)
> Wonder why he omitted Alan Wood's Unicode pages?

I do know that you can't have a space character inside an email name, so
"i18n guy" is just a friendly version of "i18n" ...
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...