Date: Mon, 21 Jul 1997 11:29:13 -0400

From: Gregory {Greg} Downing downingg[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]IS2.NYU.EDU

Subject: Re: HTML diacritics and such



At 11:04 AM 7/21/97 -0500, you wrote:

it's not safe to send anything but ASCII.



In brief: DON'T EMAIL WEIRD SYMBOLS.



Yours for clear communication,



Mark A. Mandel : Senior Linguist : mark[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]dragonsys.com



Actually, that was just a clip of a few lines on historical spellings of the

preterit of bid from OED2, and it displayed with no problems on my email

system. I've quoted from the OED before without problems, but this time I

must have hit upon a passage (probably due to two diacriticals) that got

messed up. That hadn't happened before. I've been successfully

emailing/posting umlauts and acutes and graves and so on for several years,

generated in word-processing programs and cut-and-pasted into emails....



I should have suspected there'd be a problem at some point, though -- the

diacritical problem shows up on the Indo-European and Nostratic lists with

some frequency, where it's harder to avoid....



How can one tell something is not ASCII when it looks fine on one's own

email system before it's sent?



Greg Downing/NYU, at greg.downing[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]nyu.edu or downingg[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]is2.nyu.edu