Regarding the weird letter "c" with an acute accent: I found it immediately by doing the following: 1. Use the insert symbol function on my document-creating editor (I always use some flavor of Word), scroll from top to bottom until I see the desired weird character, and insert one of them into some arbitrary text document. 2. Cursor-highlight-select that one character and copy it. 3. Open an Internet Explorer window. 4. Paste the one character copied in step 2 above into the search box. 5. Search the whole cyber-universe for that single character (I almost always use Google for this). 6. The first hit on my Google search was exactly what I wanted this time - a Wikipedia article describing this single character (grapheme) in some detail. There are apparently eight Slavic languages using this grapheme. See the Wikipedia article for further elucidation if you are interested. 7. My curiosity having been thus massively piqued, I explored graphemes and writing systems more thoroughly recently, and discovered that not only are there over 7,000 different languages today but there is also a huge number of radically different writing systems, some of which have no graphemes at all that even faintly resemble our Latin-, Greek-, or Cyrillic-derived alphabets of today. I'm talking really weird squiggles.
I have found Google to be an extremely effective replacement for posting non-mainframe-centric questions on IBM-MAIN. I get the answer much more quickly, it doesn't expand Darren's archives data base, and I don't bother thousands of fellow mainframers who are not very interested in the same arcana in which I am (graphemes, inter alia). I only stumbled upon using Google instead of IBM-MAIN when I once asked IBM-MAIN what a commonly used cyber-abbreviation meant (IMHO, it might have been IMHO, but only IIRC). This falls into the category of doing one's homework before asking other people for help. Bill Fairchild -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Michael McCawley Sent: Sunday, January 08, 2012 4:34 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: OT: Lacunć So far as the character source language for "ć", if intended, it would appear to be Slavic (Polish or Serbo-Croatian?) in origin, though seldom (never?) used as an ending consonant. http://www.unilang.org/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=23605 Enjoy -----Original Message----- From: Paul Gilmartin Sent: Sunday, January 08, 2012 3:55 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: OT: Lacunć On Jan 8, 2012, at 14:19, Tony Harminc wrote: > > But a day or two ago, I encountered the surprising word "lacunć" in > his comment on programming languages and their apologists: > IIRC, he may have said "lacunæ" and some mail agent corrupted it. First, be sure you haven't disabled MIME headers in your subscription to ASSEMBLER-LIST. -- gil
