We're interested in commentaries in languages other than English. Articles on Betty MacDonald can be published in many languages. Although the Forum as it appears in November 2006 works primarily in English, as our forum software allows only one control language at a time. However...

• There are no barriers to any language written with the Western Latin alphabet (A-Za-z0-9 plus àéüçñ etc.). You should be able to type letters with diacritical marks as you normally do. So you can open threads (topics) in many languages. I suggest only that languages not be mixed within a thread.
• Other extended alphabets require some experimentation. There are issues of matching the encoding used in our servers with the encoding used in your browsers. The issue is that the encoding used within your personal computer (e.g., for Windows) is not the same as the encoding used for the Web. This is why text can appear with missing or incorrect letters. The basic alphabet A-Za-z0-9 always works, but the extended letters may not. Some languages have alternate spellings; for example one can write the name Göthe as Goethe in German. If so, then that is always the best solution on the Web, even if ihr alte Professor wouldn't like it.
• If there is sufficient interest we can create discussion categories for any language for clarity and ease of use.
• In the future we may be able to support languages not written in the latinate alphabets. Our server supports only one-byte encoding at this time.
• Generally speaking, if you can see the text of the newspapers below in their proper alphabet, then you should be able to use the system in any western or central European language, most of the languages of Africa, Indonesia, Philippines and the Western Hemisphere. Not too bad for a start.

One suspects Betty MacDonald would be amused.

The following inserted content comes automatically from various news sites around the world. It is here to demonstrate the general ubiquity of Web technology, but if you examine the text you will find some issues regarding the various alphabets. Note that in general you can compensate for misrepresented characters by examining the context. Most if not all alphabets may lead to Rome, but the farther afield one gets the greater the likelihood of some strange results.