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

By the same scheme, why not use TF or TFN (telephone number)?  It's an
unusual abbreviation, but people will get used to it as they got used to
http, ftp, etc.

Dmitry Beransky

On Thu, 25 Jun 1998, Carrasco Benitez Manuel wrote:

> 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 11:45:05 UTC