TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: What About Areas Where Alphabet is Not Like Ours?

Re: What About Areas Where Alphabet is Not Like Ours?

Jack Hamilton (jfh@acm.org)
Thu, 08 Feb 2007 21:48:18 -0800

Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu> wrote:

> In article <telecom26.40.7@telecom-digest.org>, Joe Tibiletti
> <joetib@cox.net> wrote:

>> I raise the question, what does the telephone dial look like in areas
>> with alphabets different fron our own, such as Cairo, Egypt, or
>> Beijing, China, or Oslo, Norway? Before the time of dial phones, how
>> did operators communicate with multi lengual populations?.

> It's my understanding that the addition of letters on the dial is
> mostly an American thing, and European phones don't generally have
> them at all. I expect this is similar in most of the countries you
> mention, although I found a web page that mentioned that Russian
> phones used to have cyrillic letters on them, but they don't any more.

European mobile phones do -- they use text messaging too.

My recollection is that desk phones have numbers. A search at
www.ebay.fr found several phones with numbers clearly shown; for
example, a "Téléphone ancien année 1950" where 2=ABC 3=DEF
4=GHI 5=JKL 6=MN 7=PRS 8=TUV 9=WXY.

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Unfortunatly, the 8-bit characters were
impossible to correctly render in this message. PAT]

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