Just to add my penny's worth.
I suppose one of the problems of sloppiness comes from our past experience
with email. Like a lot of people I started out on a UNIX workstation, so
when writing in French I could not use diacritics, even if I had wanted to.
As the use of email spread to the administration and the arts department we
all got used to unreadable emails. MIME changed this, although only
gradually as some of us remained on outdated workstations long after the
arts department had been equipped with new computers. The result is that
some of us remain nervous as to what we are sending, and therefore tend to
remain in basic ASCII. I am not sure that our failure to readapt after what
was a pragmatic, and not a sloppy choice, counts as sloppiness.
Diacritics remain a problem. In teaching corpus linguistics, one of my
first problems is explaining the inherent problem of "unstable" characters
as the ease of use of current technology has masked the underlying markup.
In such cases a little bit of knowledge of computing prehistory does help.
best
Geoffrey
PS In French I admit to my incompetence being more a problem than
sloppiness. Laziness for a two-finger typist is also a factor, especially
when using upper case characters.
****************************************************************************
*************************************
Geoffrey Clive Williams
Langues Etrangères Appliquées
Université de Bretagne Sud
4 rue Jean Zay
56000 LORIENT
Geoffrey.Williams@univ-ubs.fr
http://www.univ-ubs.fr/crellic
****************************************************************************
***************************************
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 20 2001 - 11:12:34 MET DST