Re: Initials

[Vladimir Ivanov]

Title: הודעה

 Many thanks to all of you for discussion of this topic. It gave some planned results, like better understanding of syntax of the initials in English. It also gave some unexpected but very valuable and interesting results, like the way the initials are read in Herbrew, or that people in Denmark avoid writing initials at all. Special thanks to Stefan Probst, who asked: what the long threats about R(o|u)mania, Canada, California, Yankees, and Initials in various countries...... .... have to do with Unicode? Sceptical opinions induce to better formulation :). All these cases deal with transliteration. And transliteration as far as I could understand is one of the fields covered by Unicode. At least I saw here many times discussions on such issues like transliteration algorithm, difference between trancription and transliteration etc. The task of transliteration is to substitute the letters of one script by another. But the practical goal of script conversion is to help people who do not know such a script to find desired structures and patterns in foreign text in order to operate with them. References and Bibliography is a good example of this. If due to some cultural or orthographical reasons they get strange or unrecognizable syntax of the target pattern, the practical goal of transliteration wouldn't be achieved. Now, after this discussion is over, I can clearly see that initials can be one of such difficulties. But the question: to complicate or not to complicate the transliteration algorithm with syntax rules can be another topic of discussion.   Thank you once more, Vladimir Ivanov