vote...
Dr Maggie Hellstrom, Lund 
Thu, 09 Jul 1998 09:44:23 +0100 (MET)

Hi everybody,

I am happy to see that those of you "out there" with a whole lot more
initiative than myself have come up with the brilliant idea to settle
the transcription "problem" - great! I've been so confused trying to follow
what has been said lately...

Let me say that, in principle, I find great value in being able to use
"special" characters to represent Vulcan "letters" (sounds, phonemes or  
whatever they're called ;-), and from that point of view 
Saul's notation system (www,planetkc,com/locus/vald/morphemic/represent,html)
is very nice. [The optimal thing is to use a Vulcan font, e,g. the one that
Rob created and which was later made into a TrueType version useful for
Windows applics, but that is another story!]

However, I don't think I'm the only Vulcanophile who uses an old computer
system for much of my work, and many of these systems cannot even deal
with more than 7-bit ANSIcharacter encoding. That means that most accented
letters are substituted by other characters, making for a lot of confusion.
(For instance, the Swedish letter represented by an "o" with an umlaut
(two dots on top) comes out like the letter "v" - something which drives
me nuts whenever I try to read e-mails from my father!) 

I'm thus afraid that an already quite tricky task (reading, interpreting and
understanding a Vulcan text) would become quite insurmountable because of
machine-related problems, should a notation/transcription system using 
8-bit characters be implemented. (I guess I should become a bureaucrat from
the way that sentence came out - sorry!)

So, my vote would go to a transcription that is simple to use, and can be
understood/written also by people using stone-age computers... (Note: if
one uses HTML, everything is fine, since the browser can interpret the
character sets properly - problems occur whenever ascii-type files are
transferred.) However, I am not entirely in favor of the original ZC
notation either, so it seems I can only vote for Rob's alternative #5:
some mixture of ZC and SE...

All the best, and keep up the good work!

Maggie