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Red Dwarf brought me to Esperanto!

de Mariah_A, 2010-januaro-30

Mesaĝoj: 20

Lingvo: English

Rogir (Montri la profilon) 2010-februaro-07 00:52:22

It seems that English's tragic lack of any diacritics has made it blind to how important they are to other languages. I always hate search engines lumping all diacritic versions of a basic letter together, completely ignoring sensible transliterations of those diacriticised characters.

erinja (Montri la profilon) 2010-februaro-07 02:21:03

The opposite side to this coin is that sometimes you need to search for a foreign word, and your keyboard cannot type the right diacritic for one of the letters in the word, so you just type the "plain" version. It is very handy that search engines can find it even though you typed it wrong.

Yes, I know you could find a page written in that language and copy and paste the appropriate letter if it isn't available on your keyboard. But that can be a hassle.

bitterbug (Montri la profilon) 2010-februaro-07 02:52:11

You can always fall back on 'Character Map' in Windows. Linux and OSX should have something similar ridulo.gif

Click the Start Menu
Then "Run" (or in Vista/7 click on the text entry box).
Type charmap and hit enter. You now have access to lots of characters that aren't represented on your keyboard ridulo.gif

erinja (Montri la profilon) 2010-februaro-07 03:11:27

I'm well aware of the character map. I use it on occasion. In addition, I have multiple keyboards installed on my computer, for cases when I need to do more extensive typing with diacritics. I am better-equipped than most Americans to deal with foreign alphabets. But it's extra hassle, as I said before. Frequently I would rather Google something without diacritics than use charmap (or change my keyboard setting) to get a special character.

In addition, particularly with regard to charmap, it isn't always easy to pick out the right character. Tiny diacritics can look very similar to one another in charmap, and sometimes it takes me more than one try to locate and copy the right one.

In any case, I would view Google's habit of ignoring diacritics as analogous to its practice of ignoring misspellings. That is, even if you spell something wrong, Google will often detect the error and still give you the right results.

Pharoah (Montri la profilon) 2010-februaro-07 04:36:45

You can also use the EO input method at esperanto.typeit.org. I prefer it to charmap because it works in your browser from any machine and is fairly fast to type with.

jan aleksan (Montri la profilon) 2010-februaro-07 10:36:46

an other solution is Kukolo

And I vote for Fuĝkapsulo

tommjames (Montri la profilon) 2010-februaro-07 11:28:32

jan aleksan:And I vote for Fuĝkapsulo
Yea KoLonJaNo is right. "Escape pod" seems to better fit the context of the video, and at 4:55 he actually calls it that.

Rogir (Montri la profilon) 2010-februaro-07 14:18:08

But to that problem using an official transliteration (such as č - cz instead of č - c) would be a lot better solution.

erinja (Montri la profilon) 2010-februaro-07 16:58:05

Rogir:But to that problem using an official transliteration (such as č - cz instead of č - c) would be a lot better solution.
Tricky to arrange that. Native speakers would probably already have their keyboards set for the right characters. And the foreigner typing a word to search for it would still have to somehow know the official transliteration. I would never expect a non-Esperanto speaker to be familiar with our system of transliteration.

And in many ways, back to the newspaper article, I'd rather that they write the letter without a diacritic than to write using an official transliteration method. Of course the optimum situation is that they use the right letter in the first place.

ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2010-februaro-08 07:01:02

Rogir:It seems that English's tragic lack of any diacritics has made it blind to how important they are to other languages.
English uses diacritics about as much as Dutch does (and to a lesser extent Italian, except for stress + the effects on vowels that has), so I fail to see why we've singled out English here. Fact is that to most languages, foreign diacritics are just as alien, even if a person's native language is full of them. And if they're not on the keyboard, 95% of people who barely know how to use a computer let alone type on the thing aren't going to care lango.gif

Regarding the context, on youtube, on TV or in the media etc et al, to me, it doesn't matter too much if there are misspellings. I'm more worried about obtuse bias and misinformation than spelling lango.gif

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