Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin <antonio at tuvalkin dot web dot pt> wrote:
>> Only specialists can make sense of them, > > Pray tell, why so? Is the letter "Ã" an usuperable obstacle for those > who know only the letter "a"?... > > Can't the "remove diacriticals" action be performed in the reader's > brain, instead of in the typesetter's office? But if the reader merely removes the diacriticals, that destroys the whole purpose of using a *transliteration* scheme, where 'a' and 'Ã' represent different letters in the source writing system. Jony's point (I think) was that only specialists can keep track of which target characters represent which source characters, especially when obscure diacritics or digits or other symbols are used. At that point, the specialist probably knows the source characters well enough to read them directly, and the widespread use of Unicode enables document producers to use them directly. Transcriptions are another matter; the reader can read "Tchaikovsky" or "Beijing" without knowing anything at all about Cyrillic or Chinese, and still come close (theoretically) to the real pronunciation. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
