"Dominic T." > writes:

> On Jun 10, 9:44 am, Lewis Perin > wrote:
> > Kevo > writes:
> > > Hey Jim,
> >
> > > Thank you for the info. This is a different book, which I have too
> > > (129 green teas, 5 yellow teas, 13 black, 2 white, 18 oolong, 9
> > > chinese black teas, and 6 blended teas). Other than a puzzling 'Lv'
> > > for 'Lü' (green) in the pinyin, the articles written inside are
> > > detailed and informative. You have a good book!
> >
> > That "v" is puzzling, all right, but there seems to be a community of
> > people who transliterate Chinese that way, using "v" for a "u" with an
> > umlaut. I suppose the motivation is that that way you can use 7-bit
> > ASCII. I even considered using this convention in Babelcarp, but I
> > decided that most people would have no idea what it signified, so the
> > theoretical extra clarity it offered was illusory in practice. Some
> > day everyone in the world will be able to type Unicode, I guess, but
> > now most people in the USA don't have the ability to type even 8-bit
> > ASCII, much less a subset of Unicode that includes the diacritics you
> > need for proper Pinyin tones.
> >
> > /Lew
> > ---
> > Lew Perin /
>
> You should see the magic lightbulb when you show someone that there
> are extended characters in many fonts.

Maybe so, but I want to accommodate lots of users, not just those who
are savvy enough to convince their computer to enter
u-umlaut-with-a-falling-tone. Besides, more often than not, Babelcarp
users just cut and paste from stuff on the web, very little of which
is tone- and diacritic-correct Pinyin.

/Lew
---
Lew Perin /
http://www.panix.com/~perin/babelcarp.html