Re: What am I missing without mutt?

On 07/02/2008, Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Maybe "Greco-Latin" was the wrong way to write what I meant. A
longer, but hopefully clearer, method would be "alphabets of Greek
and Latin descent".

Not to continue this perpetually, but I think that you mean Latin
decent. Although, technically speaking, Latin is in fact of Greek
decent. However no Greek letters are in ASCII (the original point of
the subthread). Even Greek glyphs that look like Latin glyphs are
different codepoints.

> In Arabic, most letters combinations flow into one another as does
> cursive script in Russian and English.

But Western alphabets also have "print" script. Do semitic
languages have "print" script?

In the sense that a print script has no connected letters? Then Hebrew
does (it's the only way to write Hebrew), but Arabic does not. As each
letter in Arabic does have a "by itself' form I suppose that one could
write all their letters that way (after all, that is how it is typed),
however I do not know if that is considered correct or not. Certainly
there are Arabic speakers here who could enlighten us?

> There are still the same amount
> of letters, in fact, when typing Arabic one does not pay attention to
> the way the letters flow into one another. The OS does that part
> automatically assuming that a supportive font is installed.

Interesting. But it seems to make console apps difficult.

Could be. I'd like to hear from Arabic users how console scripts are
handled? On my machine Hebrew is reversed in the console. If someone
could enlighten me as to how to install new locales (I've googled and
cannot figure it out) then I'll try it and report back.

What about the "dots". Is that just a figment of misunderstanding?

The dots in Hebrew are optional. They indicate pronunciation, and are
not used in everyday reading and writing. In fact, the only time they
are seen is in religious texts and texts intended for those learning
Hebrew. Sometimes, when writing a foreign word that must be pronounced
correctly, they are used, but not often.

In Arabic, the dots do change letters, so they are not optional
strictly speaking. The dots are always present on signs and in print.
However, in writing, I think that they are often eliminated. Although
I don't really have much experience with handwritten Arabic, so I'm
very possibly wrong in that regard.

Dotan Cohen

http://what-is-what.com
http://gibberish.co.il
א-ב-ג-ד-ה-ו-ז-ח-ט-י-ך-כ-ל-ם-מ-ן-נ-ס-ע-ף-פ-ץ-צ-ק-ר-ש-ת

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

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