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Comment by HPsquared | Hacker News Reader

The good thing with ASCII is that everyone, everywhere can type it in using a standard keyboard. Everyone can read, write, speak and hear the basic Latin alphabet.

Not even an English/US thing, this is the Latin script from Roman times.

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You do know that the "standard" keyboard you're referring to is specifically the US keyboard?

It's not even standard for English: there's a UK keyboard that is organised differently and has different characters.

OK, we can do away with the currency symbols and brackets, and limit it to Base64. Little Bobby Tables, and perhaps a few musical artists, may need to find an alternate spelling.

That seriously underestimates how common it is for European names to have diacritics.

I assure that billions of users can't. Even if they have ASCII letters printed on their key board, which is not a given, they will be unable to find that 'f' anywhere, just like you won't find most lower case Cyrillic letters on a Russian keyboard.

And even if they know how to type in all 52 letters, it's absolutely not a given that they are able to transliterate from their native script to the English alphabet.

"Everyone, everywhere" does not have a "Latin" alphabet as the basis.

Where do you find these computers with keyboards that do not have the full set of ASCII letters printed on them? ASCII and Latin script are the lingua franca, they're not hard to learn and it's not unreasonable to ask that everyone who wants to use computers learn them.

Most Keyboards only have uppercase printed on them

You really underestimate how widespread use of Latin script is, especially in computers. People cope just fine with domain names (IDN is generally still rare), foreign brands, names of famous people etc. Sure your central chinese rice farmer living in a remote village might only be exposed to chinese script but once to get to someone familiar with a computer they likely will be able to cope with ASCII text just fine even if they don't understand the meaning.

Not sure if this is still the case or only some legacy stuff, but at least for a while chinese websites used numbers instead of names, China Railway for example uses 12306.cn as their domain name.

That's the most Ameri-centric thing I've read all day. I assure you that:

- There is no such thing as a "standard keyboard"

- Not everyone can type Latin alphabet

- Almost nobody can read, speak, hear or write latin, and it makes no sense to "hear latin alphabet". How do you pronounce "Bordeaux" using only your knowledge of the Latin alphabet? How do you pronounce "Queue" using only your knowledge of the Latin alphabet? You realise native speakers of various languages will pronounce words (for example "pain") and even letters (for example "w", "j", "y") very differently? Etc. My name is pure ASCII and every foreigner pronounces it very incorrectly (even though all the sounds exist in the English language already, just mapped to different letters).

- Not every country is related to the Roman culture.

Anyone can listen and understand when a person spells "Q U E U E", even if they don't speak English, so long as they share a common (spoken) language. Not so with "列"

Wait, so anyone can understand written English even if they don't speak English? So if I type in German you can understand it even if you don't speak German? Wie funktioniert das?

People can spell out words in a language they don't understand, as long as they understand the letters. This is good for names. People can only do this if they understand the letters.

How do you pronounce "Mebd"? Can you work out how to pronounce that name from how it's spelled? Or "Siobhan"?

Your statement isn't even remotely true.

They don't have to pronounce those: they can just spell out the letters: M-E-B-D. It's not that hard. But if the customer's name is "坂本", how exactly is the bank employee supposed to say that?

> Everyone can read, write, speak and hear the basic Latin alphabet.

Let’s set aside everyone which is illiterate. There isn’t even a single way to speak the Latin alphabet, as pronunciation depends on the language. I have a hard time believing there aren’t people who can only read and write in their native non-Latin alphabet.

I don’t know what you mean when you say everyone can hear the Latin alphabet. Listening to sounds has no relation to the language spoken. I can hear Korean just fine, doesn’t mean I understand the meaning of the words or understand their alphabet.

> Not even an English/US thing

It is common for languages which use the Latin alphabet to have diacritics and characters not present in ASCII.

Blame Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot for not including diacritics in his teleprinter code. Dude couldn't even send his own name.

Just nitpicking: Latin script from Roman times lacked W and U, among other things.

Also lower case and most typography, including spaces.

Funny! But you should put the /s in there to indicate it is satire :)

It's funny because it's true.

Edit: what do you suggest as a universal alternative for bit-perfect verbal communication... Spelling out Base64 Unicode over the phone?

> speak and hear the basic Latin alphabet.

The Latin alphabet does not have a single pronunciation. And the vowels are ambiguous across the most common languages so you can't even make an argument that they are intelligible.

You've really lost the plot on this one.

I'm only assuming the two people speaking on the phone share a common language, I think that's a fair assumption.

I instantly conjure up an image of a Roman citizen, a retired soldier now, speaking Vulgar Latin picking up the phone and dialling Comitia Centuriata to lodge a complaint about a unpaid engagement in Punic Wars.

The clerk answers in and speaks Classical Latin.

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