Date: 28 Apr 96 03:52:44 EDT
From: "Chris, London" <100423.2040-AT-compuserve.com>
To: marxismlist a <marxism-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU>
Subject: Have a care, 8-bitters


A plea, mainly to Scandinavian contributors at present.

A number of your posts no doubt read perfectly well to you, but
have =20 at the end of each line, and funny expressions in the middle
of every proper name with accents on it to ignorant 7-bit readers like me.

English is a mongrel language and not highly inflected so it has
by your standards an impoverished alphabet. True to the blinkered
chauvinism with which the English influenced the international postage
system so that we alone do not have to put the name of our country
on the stamps, so the Yanks set up the ASCII on a 7-bit system, and 
that dominates everywhere. Frankly we are dealing with 
a restricted lingua franca.

Please, so we can get the full value of your contributions, without
confusing distractions, can you post in 7-bit systems, as 
Spoons listservers cannot safely convert without risking many other
chaotic consuquential problems.

Many thanks, for your 7-bit posts

Chris B, London.

PS German subscribers quoting German sometimes use the convention
of adding an 'e' after the vowel in place of an umlaut. As for Scandinavian
languages I do not think we can safely reproduce them. I gather at
Christmas through being unable to replicate the 'o' over an 'a'
I wished Otto "Happy Slurpings"!




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