Date sent: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 15:55:18 +0100
Send reply to: classiccmp_at_u.washington.edu
From: Philip.Belben_at_pgen.com
To: "Discussion re-collecting of classic computers" <classiccmp_at_u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: OT: City Names
>
>
> >> > > Just back from Warschau (Poland) - Thanks. And BTW: since Karfreitag
> >> > Where? Oh, you mean Warszawa. Warsaw. ;-)
> >> (You're just lucky that's one of the few polish words without lots of
> >> accents etc.) Hmm do you want to start another War ? ;)
> >> If you live in a city like Munich you learn about the ways
> >> of naming a city - and of coure how senseless it is to
> >> belive in calling a thin worldwide with one single name.
> Hmm. I generally try and name a city in a language that is spoken in that city
> - so I am usually careful to write Muenchen, Nuernberg, Braunschweig for Munich,
> Nuremberg and Brunswick. But I admit that I would probably simply have written
(in the case of Munich and Nuremberg they are
in fact just literal usage of old spellings :)
> Warsaw for Warszawa.
:)) Thats a PC way without a real goal. For example, you
write Muenchen, but it is Mu"nchen .. so you still can't
reach - also , if you speak to let's say you neightbor -
will you use Munich or Muenchen ? I guess Munich - so
where's the idea (please don't get me wrong, I ceer for
your effort, and like it a lot, but in my personal opinion
it useless - maybe I'm just a bit sensible in this question
we have to much PC type thinking - again, not personal, I
know that your intension is honest and that this is not one
of this PC stuff things).
For example, I've been in Warzsawa (Did I foret to tell you ? :)
to do an analysis of a SIEMENS susidary for implementing a service
management system. They have a network of partner companies throughout
Poland (Polen, Polska) operating in different cities. While the talks
(mainly in German) I used the German names (most time), and the polish
guys used sometimes their Polish names, sometimes the German names.
We had no communication problem at all.
> Polish is one of the less bad languages for accents - Czech is far worse, to the
> extent that in the UK we generally use Polish spellings...
Please ? I can't see a big difference (I'm about to implement
both systems in our Mainframe software *) - the Polish have 9
additional characters, while the Czech have 14.
I guess, if you use your 'polish' notation, you use the German
way of writing slavic languages :) - otherwise you need more
letters. But you're right - the Czech did a complete script
reform to eliminate all dual character combinations but one.
> > Well, maybe you could explain it to me, I'm afraid I don't get it. :^)
> > I always wondered why Munich sometimes gets shown as Munchen. I can't do
> > those funny accented characters, (umlauts?) even if I knew what they meant,
> > just as well, most people around here have enough difficulty with 26
> > letters. I don't know how you guys cope with all the extras, not to mention
> > all this masculine/feminine/neuter gender and case stuff. Confused the hell
> > out of me.
> Umlauts are reasonable enough. Gramatical gender is an anachronism that should
> be abolished as soon as possible.
Why ?
> What? Have we found in the Aussies a nation who are even worse at foreign
> languages than the British? I never thought I'd live to see the day! ;-)
Maybe, since if he counts in large, non primary english speaking
parts of australia just as english ? (The experiance of driving
some hunderts of kilometers thru the outback and then getting
'Schwarzbraun ist die Haselnuss' as the first song on the first
radiostation is like beeing hit by a 1000 ton hammer)
> > CNN is about the nearest I get. Upside is that I can now read most of the
> > Cyrillic alphabet after 4 weeks of watching snippets of Serbian TV news
> > subtitles!
> > (Well I can read Belgrad(e) Pristina and Novi Sad anyway)
> Watch out! The Serbian alphabet is as different from the Russian alphabet (the
> de facto standard for Cyrillic) as the Polish alphabet is from the English
> alphabet...
AFAIK only 5 additional letters (DJE, JE, LJE, TSCHE and DSCHE)
but you're right.
> (I have somewhere a Yugoslavian banknote. Everything is written on it in four
> local languages - two using Cyrillic and two using Latin characters. The
> languages are similar enough that AFAIK nothing needs to be said more than three
> times...)
3 Language 4 scripts:
Slovenian (Latin)
Serbocroatian (Latin)
Serbocroatian (Kyrillic)
Macedonian (Cyrillic)
Servus
Hans
(*) This is a kind of a once a lifetime job ... or when do you get
a chance to develop a new characterset system :)) The task is to
enhance an 20 year old (still new releases and development) EBCDIC
mainframesystem to support not only some umlauts, but rather all
main European languages _and_ some foreign scripts like Cyrillic,
Greek or Arabic - I havn't had so much fun since a long time.
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HRK
Received on Fri Apr 16 1999 - 15:32:04 BST