RE: RE> In which languages are PHONE and TEL ambiguous

I was under the impression that the more usual abbreviation for
TELEVISION is TV.

Regards
Tomas

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Mike Brenner [SMTP:mfb@spectre.mitre.org]
> Sent:	25 June 1998 14:56
> To:	www-international@w3.org
> Subject:	RE> In which languages are PHONE and TEL ambiguous
> 
> 
> Starting with English: TEL is quite ambiguous. We just started
> connecting all the cable televisions in America to the Internet.
> For forty dollars a month you can get a million bits per second
> unlimited Internet access as well as a hundred cable channels on
> the same wire. When the price gets cut down to twenty dollars, we 
> are all probably going to buy this service. TEL means more
> TELEVISION than TELEPHONE in the United States.
> 
> However, PHONE is not ambiguous in English speaking countries after
> the dialect was standardized by the movie ET in which the
> Extra-Terrestrial
> says the famous line: ET Phone Home.
> 
> This clearly established the opinion of our primary grammarian
> (Hollywood) that PHONE is a verb that means to press the buttons
> on the telephone. 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Here is a question: how would having a PHONE: 
> distinguish between locally sending tones out of a locally 
> connected modem versus requesting an external service from
> a service provider?
> 
> Mike Brenner    mikeb@mitre.org

Received on Thursday, 25 June 1998 10:12:55 UTC