TARGET-LANGUAGE E-MAIL FROM DAY ONE

Teachers are eager to start use the target language in the classroom, even from first day of class. But many are reluctant to write their students e-mails in L2, especially if the target language uses a non-Roman writing system.

Some instructors are justifiably fearful that their students won't be able to read the messages — not because of problems with reading comprehension — but because the e-mail system won’t transmit the foreign characters.

But in the real world, our students live online. Online communication is a part of L2 literacy today. Not computer literacy. Just literacy. For that reason, I expect all my students to be able to read Cyrillic in e-mail within the first two weeks of class. I expect second year students (after 120 contact hours) to be able to write e-mail in Cyrillic.

Of course, the Russian that I send them is highly glossed and, in some cases, mixed with English.

So how do you the instructor send e-mail in a way that virtually guarantees that the recipients will see on their screens what you see on yours? And how do you gloss gracefully in e-mail?

E-MAIL IN ROMANESQUE

Consider the following example in the made-up language of Romanesque (which I invented... well, fifteen minutes ago; please don't hold it up to detailed linguistic scrutiny).

As an instructor of this less commonly taught Romance language, I insist on e-mailing my students exclusively in L2. Here’s a typical e-mail:

As you can see, at some point in their linguistic history, the Romanescans got a little carried away with diacritical marks, and today, modern literary Romanesque is stuck with them. So you can forgive the dismay of Romanesque parents who watch with horror as their kids SMS each other leaving out all those computer-unfriendly, um, fly-specks.

But if you’re going to teach this language, you need all those diacriticals. It would also be nice to be able to gloss your e-mails.

ADD A NATIVE KEYBOARD?

If your main language on the computer were Romanesque, you would just add a Romanesque keyboard (Control panel ► Regional Settings ► Add Language) and be done with it. But let’s assume that you are working on a shared computer and you are not allowed to add or delete keyboard layouts. Furthermore, few e-mail programs know how to accept really strange letters or the kind of fancy formatting shown above.

No native keyboard? No problem! Fortunately, you probably have a program that can do all of these and make it possible to transfer all your work to e-mail. That program is Microsoft Word.

How to enter “weird” alphabetic characters — three methods. For most of these to work, you must be in Word.

1.   The old fashioned way. If you know the character’s three-digit ANSI code, you can punch it in on the numeric keyboard. Make sure that the NumLock key — it’s usually near the upper right on most desktop computers — is toggled so that when you press the number keypad you get numbers and not cursor movements. For example, the code for à with a grave accent is 224. To signal the computer that you want to enter an ANSI code and not literally “224,” hold the Alt key down as you press 2 2 4 on the number pad. And Voilà!

The problem with this method is that if you use lots of accent marks, tildes, cedillas, and so on, that’s a lot of ANSI codes to memorize and a lot of work: Alt plus three keypresses every time you want an accent mark. No wonder kids forego the accents when text messaging! 

A more serious drawback is that the Alt + ANSI code method works only for the most common accent/cedilla/tilde combinations — like á. You cannot use it to cedilla an ņ, for example. 

2.   Slow but effective. In Word, go to Insert ► Symbol. You’ll get a menu of several dozen letters — from the most mundane like ñ to the most bizarre, say, ǿ. Just double-click on the letter you want. BUT… make sure that under “font” you stay within the three standard e-mail fonts: Arial, Times New Roman, or Courier New. These “safe” fonts are available to just about any computer in the world. If you try to insert a symbol from, say, Lilliputian, there’s a good chance that your recipient’s computer, in struggling to reproduce the font, will substitute a font with the wrong character set, and all your special formatting will come across garbled.  

The point here is that none of the fancy effects you enter are visible to your readers unless they have the same fonts on their machines.  

3.   Faster and effective. If you use the same symbols over and over again, you can program them on to Word key combinations. For the most common French- and Spanish-specific letters, Word by default uses the following key combinations: 

á - While pressing Ctrl, type apostrophe. Then release Ctrl and type a.
à -                              Ctrl   +      left single quote (`)           then a.
ä -                              Ctrl   +      colon (not semi-colon)    then a.
ã -                              Ctrl   +      tilde (not `)                          then a. 

This works for all the vowels and for Spanish ñ. For French ç, it’s Ctrl + comma, then c. 

Programming commonly used letters. You can program in any combination of letters plus diacriticals. If you type Latvian, you’ll need ķ, ļ, ņ, č, š, and ģ, plus vowels with long marks over them.  

As you compose, just open the Insert ► Symbol dialog box. Find the symbol you want. (Pretend it’s č.) Before you insert the letter into your text, click on Shortcut Key just below the character chart. Then enter the keystroke combination you want to use for č from now on. Let’s assume that you enter Ctrl + ^ followed by c (or Shift-6 + c). From this point forward whenever you are in Word, pressing ^ followed by c will give you č. (This trick will not work in other programs, only in Word.) 

Really weird letters. Now, what about really bizarre letters, like q́? Word has a way of placing all sorts of diacritical marks on letters where you thought they would never go. Type the main letter (like q). Then open the symbol dialog box (Insert ► Symbol). Scroll down in the font you want (such as Arial — if you want your message to show up in Arial). Keep an eye out for the Subset listed towards the upper left of the dialog box. Stop when you get to Combining diacritical marks. Pick the mark you want. It will magically fall on top of (or under, depending on whether it’s an accent mark or a cedilla-like symbol) the letter you just typed.  

As with the Latvian letters shown just above, you can program these combining diacriticals. For example, I often have to accent Russian letters in e-mail, even though Russian letters “officially” never have accent marks. So I assigned the acute combining accent mark ( ́ ) to Ctrl-w. To type the famous Russian backwards “R” letter (я) and accent it, I type я (it’s where the “z” key is, if your curious) followed by Ctrl-w and, voilà: я́.  

FANCY FORMATTING

Before we do anything fancy, let’s make the document ready to format.

To begin with, turn on paragraph markers! On the Standard Menu press the button with the  ¶  symbol or go to Tools ► Options ► View ► Formatting ► All. This turns on paragraph markers, line-break indicators and the dots that mark spaces. Most people hate working in Word like this because they think it makes the screen ugly. All right, it does. But if you do a lot of formatting, you need to see precisely where words, paragraphs, and lines end.

Font effects. Almost any formatting you can pull off in Word can be forced into an e-mail. That goes for strikethroughs, color, highlighting. sub_scripts, and super^scripts. To access these features, go to Format ► Font.

A few things, however, will not work: letters that you have shadowed or  embossed will show up as normal text. Fonts other than Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier New also face an uncertain fate when moved into e-mail. However, on modern computers, Garamond and Verdana tend to survive. In fact, any two users who share the same font set can read each others e-mails with the original fonts. But since the font set that comes with Macintosh and Linux systems varies significantly from the Windows default set, an attempt to use something oddball like Curlycuezy will result in some plain-jane text at the other end.

Paragraphing effects. The standard tricks for paragraphs — hanging indents, right justification, and right and center alignment — all work. But some of Word’s ability to control line placement (leading) down to the last millimeter looks a bit clumsy by the time it gets ported over to e-mail.

Tables. You can create and format intricate tables in Word. That’s how I did the glossing demo at the beginning of this document. Nearly all the features in a table hold up in most e-mail messages.

Formatting that doesn’t work.

1. Most images. Too many e-mail readers keep the images you might want to include from showing up exactly where you want to place them in the document.
   
   
2. Free floating text and graphics. Word allows to draw a textbox or place simple graphics (arrows, boxes, diagrams) just about anywhere on the page. The HTML code used in e-mail is more restrictive and does not allow such freely placed graphics.
   
   
3. Non-standard fonts. See Font effects, immediately above.
   
   
4. Box lines that are not part of tables.

INCOMPATIBILITY NIGHTMARES!

Sometimes, despite all efforts, your students send you foreign-language e-mail that looks like this:

?????? ??????,
????? ????? ????? ????? ?????
??? ?? ??? ?? ? ????. ???, ????!

or this:

=CA=BF=E0=FF!
=B1=B3=DF=F0=A8=AB=BD, =CA=BF=E0=FF!

Non-Roman e-mail works when both sender and receiver are using the same character set. A character set differs from a font in that the font determines what the letters look like. A character set pegs letters (from whatever font) to numerical codes. For example, an uppercase Roman A is always send as character number 65 (or 1000001 in binary code). But up until fairly recently there wasn't much agreement as to the proper code for, say, a Russian А. (It's different.) Encoding arguments took on the proportions of religious wars. At one time for Russian there were six competing character sets!

Today for the most part, all the characters in the world can fit into a single encoding — Unicode, or for most e-mail systems, UTF-8. The problem is that most e-mail systems default to a coding variably known as Western or Latin-ISO. That default produces question marks for unknown letters.

The easiest way to make sure that you are sending exactly what you see on screen and that you are seeing exactly what others send is to set your e-mail encoding (character set) to UTF-8 and send and receive HTML / rich text / formatted e-mail. Avoid using "plain text."

TALKING E-MAIL

Smartlink now allows you to turn your e-mail into voicemail in a number of languages. See their site for details.