Yesterday, I stumbled upon a blog that made me laugh. The truth be told, I have a snarky side—my evil twin, if you will. I keep it in check. Mostly. Some of you who will understand. Some of you won’t. It’s a Gemini thing. My twin is fun but good luck putting it back in its cage. And believe me, for every dollar of fun you get, you’ll pay ten dollars in social disaster. Best to keep the twin in check. ...
I stumbled across an article on lostlaowai.com www.lostlaowai.com/survival-chinese which lead me to poke around the site a bit. At the above URL, I noticed that some of the combining diacritical marks (tone marks) used in writing pinyin were not rendering properly. I had not seen this problem before. It didn’t make sense. Things that don’t make sense bug me. And being something of a character geek, I couldn’t let it go. So I tried to reproduce the problem in a test example. I couldn’t. That’s when I discovered a quirky Mac OS X copy+paste issue. I sensed there was a problem but the truth was elusive. You can’t see that copy+paste changes the string characters unless you look at a binary dump of the file (which I did). ...
Character codes and encoding In the beginning, there was ASCII. (There were others, but we begin here with ASCII). 7-bit ASCII in an 8-bit package. Using only the first seven bits of a byte, standard ASCII could not deal with diacritical marks (accents and funny dots in the vulgar vernacular). Therefore, the German word for later, später, would sometimes be transliterated into spaeter. I suspect this started in the days before computers when typewriters had only so many keys. You had to make do. ...