[HECnet] Arabic / Unicode support on VMS?

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2013-12-18 23:20, Dave McGuire wrote:

    Where are the topic nazis today??!

My god. That was a quick Godwin!

But yeah, you are right. This is drifting very off-topic. Let's call it quits, especially since Godwin have been (sortof) invoked. :-)

VMS don't speak arabic. 'Nuff said.

	Johnny


On 12/18/2013 05:13 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
On 2013-12-18 22:15, Sampsa Laine wrote:

[...] who in turn got it from the Egypts... It all starts with those
guys with the pyramids...


True but turning hieratic into a simple alphabet was a move of genius
- it enabled vastly more people to read and write as you didn't have
to spend years memorising letters while trying to survive the Bronze
Age or whatever.

Yes. Also done by the Egypts... ;-)

But the Greek were the first to get the vowels in. I'd say anything
before that is broken. :-)

Typical Indo-European bias :) In Semitic languages (which Phoenician
is), short consonants don't really matter and long ones don't matter
all that much, e.g. kitaab, ketaab, kataab all mean book..

Of course. And if you ask me, everyone should just speak Swedish. It's a
much nicer language than any other alternative.

And vowels are extremely important. Kr  ka or Kr  ka is the difference
between a crow and to barf. I think it's an important distinction. :-)

        Johnny





-- 
Johnny Billquist                                   || "I'm on a bus
                                                                  ||   on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se                         ||   Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                                         ||   tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol