From: Jony Rosenne (jr@qsm.co.il)
Date: Sat Oct 14 2006 - 01:29:42 CST
I am not sure what it means. In Israel too you see Roman (and btw, Cyrillic
and Arabic) letters all over the place, and English is required in most
schools, but a substantial minority cannot read them. Of course these people
do not use the internet and can only use specialized applications on
computers. Many other people have a great difficulty in deciphering them.
When the advertisers use Roman letters and URLs they also want to convey a
modern and sophisticated image, not just information.
The next step in internationalizing the internet should be de-Romanization,
allowing everyone to access the internet in his own language and script.
Jony
> -----Original Message-----
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org
> [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On Behalf Of Kenneth Whistler
> Sent: Friday, October 13, 2006 11:21 PM
> To: richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com
> Cc: unicode@unicode.org
> Subject: Re: postal delivery efforts
>
>
> Richard Wordingham said:
>
> > Doesn't mean they can read them. Quite a few Thais, even
> including some who
> > speak enough English to chat, don't know the Roman letters,
> although all
> > Thais are exposed to Roman letters outside school. As a
> trivial example, I
> > am regularly exposed to Chinese and Japanese on the Solaris
> CDE welcome
> > screen, but I read very little of either.
>
> True, perhaps, but that is a completely assymmetrical observation.
>
> All 127 million Japanese are continually bombarded by romaji in
> advertising and in other contexts, as well as every one of them
> having had to deal with English as a compulsory school subject
> at some point. Does that mean that all of them can read
> English? Of course not. But the amount of familiarity in Japan
> with Latin A-Z is orders of magnitude greater than the
> amount of familiarity in the United States with Chinese characters
> (outside the communities of Japanese and Chinese living in
> the United States who actually use them, of course).
>
> Picking up a random old copy of the Asahi Shimbun, I see on the front
> page:
>
> Graphical Computer Books
> Information Design Publishing
> http://www.x-media.co.jp/
> FAX ((multiple instances))
> Namco
> http://www.namco.co.jp
> http://www.aplink.co.jp/yumani
> NPO
> CS
>
> and multiple instances of single letters used in combination
> with katakana, including "A", "B", and "J".
>
> The URL's alone should illustrate the obvious -- *anybody* touching
> the internet in any way has been using Latin letters for a decade.
>
> While that still doesn't come close to the majority of the people
> of the world, the use of URL's in advertising is currently
> completely ubiquitous in East Asia, across many countries, and is
> certainly in-your-face for anyone who isn't completely illiterate.
>
> --Ken
>
>
>
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