7 bits & 8 bits

[Lorenzo Penya <laurentius@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chris, the problem with German is quite unlike the problem
with modern Roman languages. The convention of replacing
the umlauted vowel with the unumlauted vowel folllowed by an
`e' es simply coming back to an outdated orthograph, which
has been preserved in some proper names.
French, Spanish, Portuguese and to a far smaller extent
Italian (I do not know about Romanian, but i think the
case may be even worse) teem with accented vowels and
other combinations which cannot be represented with
the Procrustean 7-bits method. We do not want (I gather)
messages in such languages to be UUENCODED, at least those
of us who prefer the Digest modality. So, a convention
of sorts had better be agreed upon, whether it is mine
of representing the French language as `fran<c,>ais'
(and then my own name as `Pe<n~>a', which by the way used
to upset my e_mail programme, with lots of messages being turned
back to me and lots of other errores), or perhaps a
different convention: `fran\'cais', e.g., or the like.
Or else, what I've reluctantly decided to do with
a paper in French which I've displayed in my HTTP
directory, namely to do away with all accents etc.
(That's what J.Y. [Jacques-Yes, you say?] has chosen to do
with his 7-bits rendering.) It reads easily after all,
I can assure you. The problem is that I do not think
any French-speaking person can write directly like
that. I cannot. (Wittgenstein said. `It is my hand
which thinks, not my head'; whether that is true or not,
it is my hand which refuses to write `francais'
or `verite'.) Resorting to macros may be a solution.
Best wishes, lorenzo

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