Tech Note: Diacritic Characters : Aardvarchaeology

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Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, skeptic, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, and father of two.

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Tech Note: Diacritic Characters

Category: Blogging • Language • Tech
Posted on: March 11, 2008 5:22 PM, by Martin R

At PZ's suggestion, I've twiddled some knobs behind the scenes to force the blog to speak utf-8 instead of iso-8859-1. This will hopefully allow you guys to write even stranger comments than usual. Maybe I'll even be able to stop writing stuff like "& a u m l ;" Please try it out! Såy sömëthïng ïn Swëdïsh! Mattias, have you any lewd suggestions to make in Koiné Greek? Is anyone able to rattle off a few lines of Arabic love poetry? Go nuts, y'all!

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Comments

I didn't know PZ was a Motörhead (or is it Mötley Crüe?) fan!

Posted by: Hänk | March 11, 2008 6:36 PM

There used to be a US metal band named Tröjan. Their tour T-shirts were wildly popular in Sweden.

Posted by: Martin R | March 11, 2008 6:48 PM

ฉันอ่นภาษาไทยนะ

Posted by: Abbie | March 11, 2008 6:53 PM

Was it knob twiddling or more ραφανιδωθηι?

Posted by: Alun | March 11, 2008 6:57 PM

(Warning non-swedes, gobbledegook ahead)

Tröjan har jag lyckats missa fullständigt. Vansinnigt ful och rolig logga dock.

Posted by: Hank | March 11, 2008 7:00 PM

"Tröjan" var skoj!

日本語で説明しょう。「トレジャン」ってスヴェーデン語で「あのセーター」という意味だ。

Posted by: Janne | March 11, 2008 9:42 PM

Let's see...

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Hah! It strips out the non-breaking spaces! (at least in preview mode).

Posted by: Peter Lund | March 12, 2008 12:18 AM

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Hah! It strips out the non-breaking spaces! (at least in preview mode).

(replacing with ampersand nbsp semicolon + not going into preview)

Posted by: Peter Lund | March 12, 2008 12:19 AM

So U+00A0 gets stripped out but nbsp stays. I can live with that. Now, if only I could enforce monotype... Maybe a code tag will work?

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Posted by: Peter Lund | March 12, 2008 12:23 AM

ويمكنني ان اكتب بالعربيه الآن

Posted by: Ellery | March 12, 2008 12:25 AM

Didn't work.

Men tusind tak -- tack så mycket -- for at du gad gøre arbejdet, når nu seed ikke gad :)

I øvrigt, siden du som jeg selv både læser WulffMorgenthaler og Skalk (min farmor har en komplet samling helt fra starten og ubrudt hele vejen ind til for et par år siden og jeg har læst dem alle!) så vil du måske synes om det her:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C84WFzBMugQ

En 15-årig knægt fra Jylland som ikke selv ved hvor god han er -- og som hørte sangen (Kiss from a Rose) for første gang fem dage før showet.

Jeg kan også anbefale Lisas udgave af Crazy og Heidis udgave af Verden er i farver fra samme show:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1efvoS59Ms
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSb5WeRFEs0

Posted by: Peter Lund | March 12, 2008 12:46 AM

ᚻᛖ ᚳᚹᚫᚦ ᚦᚫᛏ ᚻᛖ ᛒᚢᛞᛖ ᚩᚾ ᚦᚫᛗ ᛚᚪᚾᛞᛖ ᚾᚩᚱᚦᚹᛖᚪᚱᛞᚢᛗ ᚹᛁᚦ ᚦᚪ ᚹᛖᛥᚫ

(Old English, which transcribed into Latin reads 'He cwaeth that he bude thaem lande northweardum with tha Westsae.' and means 'He said that he lived in the northern land near the Western Sea.')

Taken from one of my test files, which I believe originates from the Linux UTF-8 FAQ.

Posted by: blf | March 12, 2008 3:29 AM

τοτε διηνοιξεν αυτων τον νουν του συνιεναι τας γραφας

/ Mattias

Posted by: Mattias | March 12, 2008 4:41 AM

Seems the diacritics situation here has improved considerably but is still not ideal. The Scandy characters work well, which takes care of most of the problems.

Posted by: Martin R | March 12, 2008 5:09 AM

The evermost silly play with characters, even more so than that of certain 80:s metal groups, must be the american ice-cream company Häagen-Dazs. Apparently the company took its name in order to convey 'european quality' to the transatlantic market. A canadian gentleman once told me that the only word he knew in Danish was 'Häagen-Dazs', insisting that it meant 'quality dairy product'! The ice-cream is superb, however, and popular also in Europe these days.

/ Mattias

Posted by: Mattias | March 12, 2008 5:58 AM

Our friend Tor has told me about a shoe shop in Toronto that sold Scandy goods and thus called itself "Skör".

Posted by: Martin R | March 12, 2008 6:01 AM

Hopefully this might make the above comment make sense to non-swedish speakers as well.

Skor - Plural of shoe
Skör - Fragile/brittle

Posted by: Hank | March 12, 2008 9:16 AM

One is pronounced "skoor", the other "sure".

Hell and gore, shun GOP Father Alan lay!

Posted by: Martin R | March 12, 2008 9:42 AM

עם ישראל חי! Hebrew: 'am yisrael chai meaning life to the people of Israel

Posted by: Jason Fox | March 12, 2008 11:38 AM

How about this guy: 三船敏郎 ?

Posted by: Rien | March 12, 2008 12:28 PM

Maybe the person who put an umlaut on "Skor" had some knowledge of german and believed that all germanic languages used these funny letters to produce pluralis (thus making a false connection between, for example, "Mann"-"Männer" and "Sko"-"Skör")?

/ Mattias

Posted by: Mattias | March 13, 2008 8:10 AM

I think we should avoid the temptation to anthropomorphise the Canadians, attributing a level of rationality to them of which there really is very little evidence.

Posted by: Martin R | March 13, 2008 8:13 AM