COTW: Index II. Persons, Beasts and Monsters
Belba Grubb From Stock
again have double-posted with this, please just call me an idiot and
carry on! :-) )
"Persons, Beasts and Monsters" has to be my all-time favorite category
for any book (or social list, for that matter), especially with the note
"references are selective."
That of course brings up the questions, why were these selected and
who/what does not appear in this list and why not.
This is an index section that I have consulted frequently over the years
to quickly find some of my favorite sections in the story; this probably
shows just how powerful are the characters and places JRRT wrote about,
that a whole scene or series of scenes may be evoked with just one name:
Bob, for instance; or
Fimbrethil...Dwimmerlaik...elf-horse...Ioreth...Pimple...Silent
Watchers...Stybba...and Yrch.
For names, the listings for "Aragorn" bring up a comment someone made in
these COTW discussions many moons ago; they called Aragorn the dude with
way too many names(indeed, even more of his names are scattered
throughout the Index). DWWTMN could also be said of Gandalf, and even
Galadriel. The entry for Baggins is delightful: "Angelica, Bilbo, Dora,
Drogo, Frodo, and Mad." And it's interesting that there is an entry for
Company of the Ring that spans the entire matter from when the
Fellowship leaves Rivendell to the end of Book II; is that a good idea
or is it carrying a good idea a bit too far?
To carry on the trivia game, there certainly are obscure references
guaranteed to draw you back into the book just to find out who or what
they are (and this has often resulted in my re-reading several sections
all over again): Ufthak, Nali, Herefara, Golsagil, Galmod, Damrod (a
considerable personage, beast or monster, given the number of references
in the book, and yet I don't recall him at all just now), Araw, and so
forth.
I wish to point out that the Grubbs have an entry all their own!!! ;-)
There is a deeper appreciation of this Index after one has become more
familiar with JRRT's work. Here we have not only representatives from
/The Hobbit/ to provide a link with the earlier work, but also names
from /The Silmarillion/, as well as selected references from /The Lord
of the Rings/, and so here we see more clearly just how JRRT wove that
greater mythology into his work. He did so much more thoroughly than I
had been realized in just through reading the story text.
There are also some notes on language here among the definitions; I
believe JRRT had wanted to provide an extensive language reference along
the lines of what eventually did appear in /The Silmarillion/ but this
was not done for /The Lord of the Rings/.
Well, I've gone on too much again. What are your thoughts, opinions,
and loves/hates/ponderings on "Persons, Beasts and Monsters"?
Barb
Steuard Jensen
<11j1kin...@corp.supernews.com>:
> For names, the listings for "Aragorn" bring up a comment someone
> made in these COTW discussions many moons ago; they called Aragorn
> the dude with way too many names(indeed, even more of his names are
> scattered throughout the Index).
As I recall, Bored of the Rings made that a bit of a running joke.
(But that was probably mentioned in the earlier discussion. :) )
> And it's interesting that there is an entry for Company of the Ring
> that spans the entire matter from when the Fellowship leaves
> Rivendell to the end of Book II; is that a good idea or is it
> carrying a good idea a bit too far?
It's certainly hard to see how it would be useful!
> To carry on the trivia game, there certainly are obscure references
> guaranteed to draw you back into the book just to find out who or what
> they are (and this has often resulted in my re-reading several sections
> all over again): Ufthak, Nali, Herefara, Golsagil, Galmod, Damrod (a
> considerable personage, beast or monster, given the number of references
> in the book, and yet I don't recall him at all just now), Araw, and so
> forth.
Ok, let's see... I have no idea how well I'll do on these, but I'll
give it a spin. I might do a _bit_ better if I spent extra time
pondering, but probably not much.
Ufthak: The Orc of Cirith Ungol whom Shelob caught, and who was found
alive later?
Nali: Was that Thror's companion, who brought his severed head back
from Moria? Certainly a Dwarf, anyway.
Herefara: Sounds like someone from Rohan, but I have no good guess as
to who.
Golsagil: A regional commander from western Gondor, I believe. I seem
to associate him with someone with a name like "Hirulin" for some
reason. (And perhaps embarrassingly, I think I recognize this name as
much from the ancient computer game "War in Middle-earth" as from the
books.) (I've now looked this up, and discovered that I _wasn't_
going crazy: it's "Golasgil", not "Golsagil". And *Hirluin* _was_
another Gondorian leader, whose territory was indeed right next to
Golasgil's Anfalas.)
Galmod: My word, I have no idea. Seems like a generic Gondor sort of
name. (But no! Grima's father, it would seem. I probably should
have thought of that. Maybe seeing the accents over the vowels would
have helped place this as a Rohirric name.)
Damrod: One of Faramir's rangers in Ithilien who stood guard over
Frodo and Sam during the ambush (with Mablung, I believe). He may
also have been the one who spotted Gollum in the woods on the way to
Henneth Annun, and I think he was one of the people ready to shoot
Gollum at the Forbidden Pool.
Araw: I'm most familiar with this in the construction "Kine of Araw",
wild beasts (cattle of some sort?) from the east (in Rhun, perhaps?).
I have some memory that Araw was a name for Aule. (I had to look it
up to find out, and now I'm embarrassed: of course these hunted beasts
would be associated with *Orome*, not Aule. Silly me.)
> Well, I've gone on too much again. What are your thoughts,
> opinions, and loves/hates/ponderings on "Persons, Beasts and
> Monsters"?
My only real story about learning something from the index comes from
the "Things" section, so I'll hold off for now. :)
Steuard Jensen
Christopher Kreuzer
> Quoth Belba Grubb From Stock <ba...@dbtech.net>:
<snip>
>> Well, I've gone on too much again. What are your thoughts,
>> opinions, and loves/hates/ponderings on "Persons, Beasts and
>> Monsters"?
>
> My only real story about learning something from the index comes from
> the "Things" section, so I'll hold off for now. :)
Hmm. Something you learnt from the index.
Would that be the entry for 'Star'?
Actually, I think this discussion _is_ meant to cover all the indices
apart from the 'Songs' index. That is the impression I get at the
project page:
"Sept 12th 2005
Indices II-IV
Persons, Beasts and Monsters; Places; and Things
Open Discussion"
On the other hand, Belba's post (title and content) only covered
"Persons, Beasts and Monsters", so maybe wait a bit and see if she
confirms whether or not the 'Places' and 'Things' indices are meant to
be separate discussions, or whether we should talk about them as well.
Christopher
--
---
Reply clue: Saruman welcomes you to Spamgard
Christopher Kreuzer
<snip>
> Ok, let's see... I have no idea how well I'll do on these, but I'll
> give it a spin. I might do a _bit_ better if I spent extra time
> pondering, but probably not much.
:-)
Did you see the quizzes in the 'Songs and Verses' thread?
Christopher Kreuzer
> "Persons, Beasts and Monsters" has to be my all-time favorite category
> for any book (or social list, for that matter), especially with the
> note "references are selective."
>
> That of course brings up the questions, why were these selected and
> who/what does not appear in this list and why not.
There was a discussion a few months back about the history of the index.
You have to remember that the First Edition of LotR did not have an
index. And even this index does not fully cover the Appendices. Some of
the index entries refer to the Appendices, but many of the names in the
Appendices do not appear in the index.
<snip>
> There are also some notes on language here among the definitions; I
> believe JRRT had wanted to provide an extensive language reference
> along the lines of what eventually did appear in /The Silmarillion/
> but this was not done for /The Lord of the Rings/.
Do you remember where you read or heard this?
> Well, I've gone on too much again. What are your thoughts, opinions,
> and loves/hates/ponderings on "Persons, Beasts and Monsters"?
I was surprised by the entry for Grimbold. It looks like there were
_two_ Grimbolds: Grimbold (of Grimslade) and Grimbold (of Westfold). And
there is a lengthy note explaining who Grimbold of Grimslade is, which
makes this entry stand out from the others. Why an explanatory note here
and not elsewhere?
And in general, there seems little rhyme or reason to the explanatory
notes. Why explain that Morgoth is an "evil Vala", and that Orome/Araw
is also a Vala, but then not bother explaining what sort of being Sauron
is?
Huh? What the hell are 'Neekerbreekers'? The reference is to somewhere
in the first half of FotR... Ah! All is clear now! :-)
And Bilbo was given the title of 'Ring-finder' by Gandalf. I'd forgotten
that. Seems a bit of a waste of an index entry though.
It was interesting glancing through the index of 'Persons, Beasts and
Monsters'. I think I generally find the other indices slightly more
interesting though, especially the ones on place names.
Steuard Jensen
<mPkYe.113079$G8.1...@text.news.blueyonder.co.uk>:
> Steuard Jensen <sbje...@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:
> > Ok, let's see... I have no idea how well I'll do on these, but I'll
> > give it a spin.
> Did you see the quizzes in the 'Songs and Verses' thread?
Unfortunately, no. I've just moved to a new apartment in the past
couple of weeks, and I'm still very busy with my physics work, so my
participation here has been on life support lately. It probably still
ought to be now, in fact, but I'm weak. :) Maybe I'll pop over to the
earlier thread and see how I do... but then I'll have to disappear for
a while again.
I'm very interested in the Silmarillion COTW project, incidentally.
I'd _like_ to participate more actively in that! But again, work is
rather important at the moment (and I've still got an Uruk-hai essay
update hanging over my head in the Tolkien category, for better or
worse).
Steuard Jensen
Yuk Tang
news:iHAYe.34$55....@news.uchicago.edu:
> I'm very interested in the Silmarillion COTW project,
> incidentally. I'd _like_ to participate more actively in that!
> But again, work is rather important at the moment (and I've still
> got an Uruk-hai essay update hanging over my head in the Tolkien
> category, for better or worse).
You've reached a consensus with Martinez?
--
Cheers, ymt.
Steuard Jensen
<Xns96D9CB1BADC4D...@130.133.1.4>:
> sbje...@midway.uchicago.edu (Steuard Jensen) wrote:
> > ...(and I've still got an Uruk-hai essay update hanging over my
> > head in the Tolkien category, for better or worse).
> You've reached a consensus with Martinez?
No, I haven't communicated with him on the subject since his last
posts here. (Or rather, since my last posts in that old thread, which
I believe asked him for clarification of one or two points.) And I
honestly don't know if any consensus on the "facts" is possible for
the two of us at this point: I'm awfully convinced that Tolkien's
writings tell one story, and he's awfully convinced that they tell a
different one. I'm a big fan of consensus and compromise, don't get
me wrong, but in some cases I feel like one side of a debate really is
convincingly stronger.
But in any case, I have specific plans for rewriting my
essay/summary/whatever in response to comments by him and by others,
and I've even gotten a start on doing so. Real Life(TM) has simply
taken priority for the past couple of months. Also, I expect the
essay to be a fairly lengthy project, and the frustration of the
debate itself makes writing a balanced essay/summary less than
inspiring. :)
Steuard Jensen
Belba Grubb From Stock
<snip>
>
>>There are also some notes on language here among the definitions; I
>>believe JRRT had wanted to provide an extensive language reference
>>along the lines of what eventually did appear in /The Silmarillion/
>>but this was not done for /The Lord of the Rings/.
>
>
> Do you remember where you read or heard this?
It's in /Letters/ -- I forget which one(s), though. It's been a little
busy here and I haven't been in /Letters/ for a while, unfortunately.
It's in the part where he was discussing his secondary creation as a
nexus of languages, perhaps.
> I was surprised by the entry for Grimbold. It looks like there were
> _two_ Grimbolds: Grimbold (of Grimslade) and Grimbold (of Westfold). And
> there is a lengthy note explaining who Grimbold of Grimslade is, which
> makes this entry stand out from the others.
Are you sure they're not the same person? I think you're right but
never can quite grasp the difference between the two.
<snip>
> And in general, there seems little rhyme or reason to the explanatory
> notes. Why explain that Morgoth is an "evil Vala", and that Orome/Araw
> is also a Vala, but then not bother explaining what sort of being Sauron
> is?
It works much better from the reader's perspective. It's so much more
interesting than a dead weight of explanation to instead see the living
story unfold before our uncomprehending eyes, for example, our awe as
the "spirits" of Sauron and Saruman appear after their physical forms
are destroyed; that tantalizing glimpse we ourselves have of the West
from whence comes the Voice in Faramir's and Boromir's dream; and so forth.
Also, the introduction of a few of the major Valar is a sort of
"trailer" for the work that was planned to follow /The Lord of the
Rings/. It doesn't distract from the story we are currently involved in
and whets the appetite for more.
>
> Huh? What the hell are 'Neekerbreekers'? The reference is to somewhere
> in the first half of FotR... Ah! All is clear now! :-)
DEET, mon, DEET!
Barb
Belba Grubb From Stock
<snip>
> Ufthak: The Orc of Cirith Ungol whom Shelob caught, and who was found
> alive later?
Yes, that's right! I had forgotten his name.
> Nali: Was that Thror's companion, who brought his severed head back
> from Moria? Certainly a Dwarf, anyway.
It could be -- am not sure about that, though.
> Golsagil: A regional commander from western Gondor, I believe. I seem
> to associate him with someone with a name like "Hirulin" for some
> reason. (And perhaps embarrassingly, I think I recognize this name as
> much from the ancient computer game "War in Middle-earth" as from the
> books.)
That's okay -- I recognized one of the verses last week only because
Donald Swann had once put that song to music.
>(I've now looked this up, and discovered that I _wasn't_
> going crazy: it's "Golasgil", not "Golsagil". And *Hirluin* _was_
> another Gondorian leader, whose territory was indeed right next to
> Golasgil's Anfalas.)
Oops! Mea typo.
>
> Galmod: My word, I have no idea. Seems like a generic Gondor sort of
> name. (But no! Grima's father, it would seem. I probably should
> have thought of that. Maybe seeing the accents over the vowels would
> have helped place this as a Rohirric name.)
A confession: I'm so confused about the different ways people's
newsreaders interpret characters that I've gotten into the habit of
completely dropping the accents and other markings; unfortunately, it
does lead to confusion sometimes. Sorry! Is Unicode a good way to go
on that?
>> Well, I've gone on too much again. What are your thoughts,
>> opinions, and loves/hates/ponderings on "Persons, Beasts and
>> Monsters"?
>
>
> My only real story about learning something from the index comes from
> the "Things" section, so I'll hold off for now. :)
Hmmm -- a teaser. Wonder what it could be. Looking forward to hearing
about it.
Barb
Odysseus
>
<snip>
>
> A confession: I'm so confused about the different ways people's
> newsreaders interpret characters that I've gotten into the habit of
> completely dropping the accents and other markings; unfortunately, it
> does lead to confusion sometimes. Sorry! Is Unicode a good way to go
> on that?
>
For the more usual accents (i.e. those used for the languages of
western Europe and Arda) you don't need to use full-blown Unicode
(UTF-8), which many older newsreaders can't handle. The ISO-8859
(Latin-1) subset or something similar should work fine, as long as
your newsreader puts an appropriate character-set identifier in the
headers. AFAICS your Mozilla Thunderbird is doing just that, so none
but truly antique (in computing terms) newsreaders or servers should
have any trouble with any áccèntëd vôwels, Æ or Œ ligatures (æ œ),
Ç-çedilla, Ñ-tilde (ñ), German double S (ß), ør the like that you
cåre to type. (I'd be interested to know if any of the preceding get
garbled for anyone here.)
OTOH if you want to use haceks, carons, Polish L-slashes, or macrons,
or pretty well any diacritical marks on consonants (other than those
mentioned above), or another alphabet such as Greek or Cyrillic,
UTF-8 is likely your best bet (and AFAIK T'bird can use it well) --
but quite a few readers will see it as gibberish, especially if
they're not up to delving into their software's language settings.
--
Odysseus
Christopher Kreuzer
<snip>
>> I was surprised by the entry for Grimbold. It looks like there were
>> _two_ Grimbolds: Grimbold (of Grimslade) and Grimbold (of Westfold).
>> And there is a lengthy note explaining who Grimbold of Grimslade is,
>> which makes this entry stand out from the others.
>
> Are you sure they're not the same person? I think you're right but
> never can quite grasp the difference between the two.
You are right, they could be the same person. Couldn't find Grimslade on
the map, so I guess we'll never know.
Yuk Tang
news:uJg_e.116780$G8.9...@text.news.blueyonder.co.uk:
Westfold is the western sector of Rohan, a pretty big area.
Grimslade may be the village or more localised area where he's from.
Eg. Bilbo Baggins of the Shire is also Bilbo Baggins of Hobbiton.
Also, IIRC Grimbold was one of three Marshals of Rohan, the others
being Elfhelm and Eomer, and was in charge of Westfold. So Grimbold
of Grimslade may have been known as such in personal circles, but may
have been called * of Westfold where the military were concerned.
--
Cheers, ymt.
Huan the hound
[snip]
> OTOH if you want to use haceks, carons, Polish L-slashes, or macrons,
> or pretty well any diacritical marks on consonants (other than those
> mentioned above), or another alphabet such as Greek or Cyrillic,
> UTF-8 is likely your best bet (and AFAIK T'bird can use it well) --
> but quite a few readers will see it as gibberish, especially if
> they're not up to delving into their software's language settings.
I don't understand much about character set, but Thunderbird
is very good at handling them. Usually it works
automatically on e-mail/posts you receive, and if not, you
can go to Options -> Character Encoding and change it until
the message looks right. I know this because there is more
than one character set (maybe 3) that can be used for
simplified Chinese, which I sometimes see in e-mail from
friends. However, I'm afraid to write back because I don't
know how *they* will handle it (mostly the "cn" Yahoo). I'm
not always positive about what character set they used.
Huan, the hound of Valinor
--
Yet at length Draugluin escaped, and fleeing back into the
tower he died before Sauron's feet; and as he died he told
his master: 'Huan is there!'
Odysseus
>
<snip>
>
> I don't understand much about character set, but Thunderbird
> is very good at handling them. Usually it works
> automatically on e-mail/posts you receive, and if not, you
> can go to Options -> Character Encoding and change it until
> the message looks right. I know this because there is more
> than one character set (maybe 3) that can be used for
> simplified Chinese, which I sometimes see in e-mail from
> friends. However, I'm afraid to write back because I don't
> know how *they* will handle it (mostly the "cn" Yahoo). I'm
> not always positive about what character set they used.
At work, where I have Mac OS X, I use MT-Newswatcher. It's usually
pretty good at handling various character sets, but in some cases
(e.g. UTF-8 messages containing polytonic Greek) I'm uable to get
them to display properly no matter what settings I choose. Using
Thunderbird the same messages come through just fine. Unfortunately
there doesn't seem to be a version for OS 9; I have the last Mozilla
for this platform but its newsreader completely lacks filters,
something I won't do without in many of the groups I read. (I'm happy
to say that RABT isn't one of those.)
I know very little about Chinese, but I gather that the principal
competitor to Unicode, having been a _de facto_ standard in the Far
East for quite some time, is an encoding called "Big 5".
--
Odysseus
Steuard Jensen
> Steuard Jensen wrote:
> > Nali: Was that Thror's companion, who brought his severed head back
> > from Moria? Certainly a Dwarf, anyway.
> It could be -- am not sure about that, though.
I seem to recall that I looked it up and learned that Nali was just
one of the Dwarves who accompanied Balin to reoccupy Moria.
> > Galmod: My word, I have no idea. Seems like a generic Gondor sort
> > of name. (But no! Grima's father, it would seem. I probably
> > should have thought of that. Maybe seeing the accents over the
> > vowels would have helped place this as a Rohirric name.)
> A confession: I'm so confused about the different ways people's
> newsreaders interpret characters that I've gotten into the habit of
> completely dropping the accents and other markings; unfortunately, it
> does lead to confusion sometimes. Sorry! Is Unicode a good way to go
> on that?
Oh, I wasn't trying to criticize! I've been posting here for, sheesh,
over a decade now, and I have yet to post a single accented
character. :) Maybe I should, but I've never really learned how
myself, and I've often felt that Usenet should be kept as
ASCII-friendly as possible. But that may just be an excuse I make to
cover up my American incomprehension of accents in general. (Yes, I
generally got them right when I was taking French classes, but I don't
think I ever _liked_ them. :) )
It's especially difficult for me because I use a plain-text newsreader
("trn") that's probably old enough to be less than perfectly aware of
character sets and things. So I'm guessing that I'd need to add a
Content-Type header by hand. (I've actually added a hack to my trn
configuration file that copies in the previous person's Content-Type
header if I reply to a post that had one, just in case I quote text
that includes accented characters.) I compose messages using "emacs"
in a Mac terminal window, and while the Mac is apparently very good at
doing international characters properly, I'm really not sure how well
its way of doing that will get along with emacs. :)
It's all very complicated. And if I did start using accents, I'd have
to re-learn how all of the words in Middle-earth are spelled. :)
> > My only real story about learning something from the index comes
> > from the "Things" section, so I'll hold off for now. :)
> Hmmm -- a teaser. Wonder what it could be. Looking forward to
> hearing about it.
Christopher's already guessed it, I believe. :) It was indeed "star".
I was just stunned to discover that the index actually contained
substantial original information that couldn't be found anywhere else.
Steuard Jensen
Steuard Jensen
<4338C1DE...@yahoo-dot.ca>:
> Belba Grubb From Stock wrote:
> > and other markings; unfortunately, it does lead to confusion
> > sometimes. Sorry! Is Unicode a good way to go on that?
> The ISO-8859 (Latin-1) subset or something similar should work...
> ...none but truly antique (in computing terms) newsreaders or
> servers should have any trouble with any áccčntëd vôwels, Ć or Ś
> ligatures (ć ś), Ç-çedilla, Ń-tilde (ń), German double S (ß), řr
> the like that you cĺre to type. (I'd be interested to know if any of
> the preceding get garbled for anyone here.)
Interesting. It all showed up fine in "trn" inside a Mac terminal
window (and if anyone is using a newsreader more antique than trn, I'd
be amazed). But now that I've gone to edit this reply in emacs, a
couple of characters are no longer displayed properly: namely, "Ś"
shows up as "\214" and "ś" shows up as "\234". (I'm honestly not
sure what those are supposed to be, now.) There's probably an emacs
setting somewhere that would fix that, maybe. I wonder if I can enter
accented characters here using the usual Mac tricks? (Hmm... not as
long as I'm using the "option" key as "meta", it would seem. :) What
about this little menu thingy? Nope, doesn't work at all. Any
advice out there?)
Steuard Jensen
Dirk Thierbach
> Quoth Odysseus <odysseu...@yahoo-dot.ca> in article
[with charset ISO-8859-1]
>> ...none but truly antique (in computing terms) newsreaders or
>> servers should have any trouble with any áccèntëd vôwels, Æ or ?
>> ligatures (æ ?), Ç-çedilla, Ñ-tilde (ñ), German double S (ß), ør
>> the like that you cåre to type. (I'd be interested to know if any of
>> the preceding get garbled for anyone here.)
> But now that I've gone to edit this reply in emacs, a
> couple of characters are no longer displayed properly: namely, "?"
> shows up as "\214" and "?" shows up as "\234". (I'm honestly not
> sure what those are supposed to be, now.)
Those are the decimal codes for the ISO-8859-1 encoding.
> There's probably an emacs setting somewhere that would fix that, maybe.
You need (standard-display-european 1) in your .emacs file, and some
charset that actually has those characters.
> I wonder if I can enter accented characters here using the usual Mac
> tricks? (Hmm... not as long as I'm using the "option" key as
> "meta", it would seem. :)
Try setting "iso-accents-mode". Then a few keys will compose with the
following letter, so ' and a yields á, ~ and c yield ç, and so on.
Compose with space for the original letter.
> Any advice out there?
HTH,
- Dirk
Christopher Kreuzer
<snip>
> It's all very complicated. And if I did start using accents, I'd have
> to re-learn how all of the words in Middle-earth are spelled. :)
You need to get a Middle-earth spellchecker...
That would replace Manwe with Manwë and so on.
Which got me wondering. If someone did OCR scanning on some of Tolkien's
works and extracted a list of proper names and nouns by running a
spellchecker over the OCR text to grab unrecognised words, does that
list have use restrictions because a copyright work was used to compile
the list?
Huan the hound
>
> Interesting. It all showed up fine in "trn" inside a Mac terminal
> window (and if anyone is using a newsreader more antique than trn, I'd
> be amazed).
Steuard, maybe you can give me some advice. In addition to Thunderbird,
I use slrn as my main newsreader on my Mac. Can you tell me how you set
up trn to show these characters properly so I can figure out how to get
slrn to do it?
> But now that I've gone to edit this reply in emacs, a
> couple of characters are no longer displayed properly: namely, "Ś"
> shows up as "\214" and "ś" shows up as "\234". (I'm honestly not
> sure what those are supposed to be, now.) There's probably an emacs
> setting somewhere that would fix that, maybe. I wonder if I can enter
> accented characters here using the usual Mac tricks? (Hmm... not as
> long as I'm using the "option" key as "meta", it would seem. :) What
> about this little menu thingy? Nope, doesn't work at all. Any
> advice out there?)
I don't use emacs so I can't help you. However sometimes the meta key
can be the "esc" key on your keyboard. I suspect that would be really
annoying in emacs though. I don't think the option key works the same
100% of the time in a shell, even though it's a Mac.
--
Derek Broughton
> Which got me wondering. If someone did OCR scanning on some of Tolkien's
> works and extracted a list of proper names and nouns by running a
> spellchecker over the OCR text to grab unrecognised words, does that
> list have use restrictions because a copyright work was used to compile
> the list?
iirc, a US case ruled you couldn't copyright the contents of a phone book -
because copyright involves both the content and the presentation. So by
taking all the words out of context and making them into an alphabetic
list, it should be OK. Of course, IANAL :-) otoh, hasn't the Tolkien
estate already prevented people from using names created by JRRT?
--
derek
Steuard Jensen
<1127946395.2eda8b95bbea975cb926ca970938d370@teranews>:
> On 2005-09-28, Steuard Jensen <sbje...@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:
> > Interesting. It all showed up fine in "trn" inside a Mac terminal
> > window
> Steuard, maybe you can give me some advice. In addition to
> Thunderbird, I use slrn as my main newsreader on my Mac. Can you
> tell me how you set up trn to show these characters properly so I
> can figure out how to get slrn to do it?
Hmm. I can't remember doing anything at all, actually. It's possible
that I set it up a long time ago somehow, but maybe I just happened to
pick the right character encoding for the Mac terminal. Good luck, in
any case!
> > I wonder if I can enter accented characters here using the usual
> > Mac tricks? (Hmm... not as long as I'm using the "option" key as
> > "meta", it would seem. :) What about this little menu thingy?
> > Nope, doesn't work at all. Any advice out there?)
> I don't use emacs so I can't help you. However sometimes the meta
> key can be the "esc" key on your keyboard.
I'm actually fairly used to that mode (I still use esc for meta by
habit sometimes). But since the "insert character" function didn't
work either, I think it goes beyond that. (I guess I need to tell
emacs to expect a different input encoding.)
Steuard Jensen
Odysseus
>
> Steuard Jensen <sbje...@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:
> > Quoth Odysseus <odysseu...@yahoo-dot.ca> in article
>
> [with charset ISO-8859-1]
>
> >> ...none but truly antique (in computing terms) newsreaders or
> >> servers should have any trouble with any áccèntëd vôwels, Æ or ?
> >> ligatures (æ ?), Ç-çedilla, Ñ-tilde (ñ), German double S (ß), ør
> >> the like that you cåre to type. (I'd be interested to know if any of
> >> the preceding get garbled for anyone here.)
>
> > But now that I've gone to edit this reply in emacs, a
> > couple of characters are no longer displayed properly: namely, "?"
> > shows up as "\214" and "?" shows up as "\234". (I'm honestly not
> > sure what those are supposed to be, now.)
>
> Those are the decimal codes for the ISO-8859-1 encoding.
Part of the problem may be that my newsreader (Netscape 4) insists on
identifying all its postings as "us-ascii" regardless of what
character set I choose for viewing. Even where that doesn't actually
hinder the interpretation of eight-bit characters, it certainly can't help.
Although the OE- and oe-ligatures (Œ & œ) looked correct to me in
Steuard's message -- both where he quoted me and where he typed (or
pasted in) his own -- they've turned into question marks above. The
others all survived.
--
Odysseus
Belba Grubb From Stock
> OTOH if you want to use haceks, carons, Polish L-slashes, or macrons,
> or pretty well any diacritical marks on consonants (other than those
> mentioned above), or another alphabet such as Greek or Cyrillic,
> UTF-8 is likely your best bet (and AFAIK T'bird can use it well) --
> but quite a few readers will see it as gibberish, especially if
> they're not up to delving into their software's language settings.
Well, it seems from this discussion that even the more ordinary signs
get complicated in some newsreaders.
The Vietnamese language is one of inflection, and the modern form is
written in Roman letters; diacrticals are crucial to a word's meaning;
for instance, the word "ma" can have five different (and wholly
unrelated) meanings depending on the diacritical used. They have
created a Viet Net version of the language where regular keyboard
symbols can be used to show the diacritical. For instance,I'm pretty
rusty with this but I think:
"Bạn biết thêm tài nguyên khác?"
which is in Unicode and may or may not display properly on your
newsreader, is written in Viet Net as
"B.an bi+^+'et th+^em t+`ai nguy+^en kh+'ac?"
Eminently practical, but it does sometime confuse Vietnamese who first
see it; they quickly get the hang of it however. (By the way, don't ask
me what it means -- my Vietnamese lessons had to be put aside at an
early stage some years ago: I found that at an aid page for Hurricane
Katrina victims at http://www.mirawebdesign.com/vietnamese.html )
Probably that wouldn't work for something that was used only
infrequently and on which one's whole communication with others didn't
depend. Would it have made it any easier to read G+'alm+'od? Most
likely not.
Sigh.
Barb
John W. Kennedy
> The Vietnamese language is one of inflection,
Tones. "Inflection" means something completely different in discussing
languages.
--
John W. Kennedy
"...if you had to fall in love with someone who was evil, I can see why
it was her."
-- "Alias"