Fernando wrote: >>Hello, I write from Spain, I4m Spanish, and I must say to Michael Paz that "el mundo es un paquelo" has no sense in Spanish. The correct one is "el mundo es un paquelo" (the world is a handkerchief).<<
Paz replied >>HUH??? Where I come from "El Mundo es un panuelo" is the world is a hankerchief. Where did this whole thing get started? I don't recall posting anything about the world being a hankerchief in any language. << mike in Barcelona says that he (and NOT Paz) wrote the original sentence referred to (and mangled up) above . I was talking about the coincidence about the Yoko Ono poster and the bar called 'Imagine' which was right next to it. Where in English you (we) would say "Small World" to express surprise at the coincidence, here in Spain we say 'El mundo es un panuelo' (except that the letter 'n' in panuelo would be the Spanish letter with the tilde above, as it would be in 'Senor'). It's very frustrating not to be able to use these letters on a standard keyboard. How Fernando got this mixed up I don't know. This is a classic example of ethnocentric thinking on the Internet. People are unable to write Spanish, Portuguese or French characters (not to mention not-European letters) because the Internet was created by and for English speakers. I have discussed this with Les and asked if it were possible to use these non-standard characters and was told to 'try it and see what happens'. Clearly, as you can see in the first extract above, it is simply not possible to write the word for 'handkerchief', or 'Mister', or 'tomorrow' in Spanish, all quite common words for people in New Mexico, Arizona, California and many other Spanish-speaking areas of the USA because the Internet protocols translate these characters into something else, such as 'paquelo' which does not mean anything. Sorry Paz got dragged into this mess without being responsible for it all, but that's the situation for people from other languages who want to use words, including their own name, which originate in other languages, even languages that share the same (more or less) character set. Any suggestions from anyone out there? Mike in Barcelona.
