Analog(u)e design newsgroup?

On usenet, sci.electronics.design, but it's got more off-topic posts than this ng.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Hi Geoffrey,

Other than what Spehro mentioned there are a few more but in other languages. So if you speak German or French there are de.sci.electronics and fr.sci.electronique. Often such foreign language communities don't mind the occasional post in English. After all, engineers really ought to master English no matter where they live. Else they couldn't understand most data sheets.

Regards, Joerg

de.sci.electronics

don't

ought

Seems thats changing, I've noticed many manufacturers are offering data sheets written in Chinese now(don't know what flavor of Chinese).

IIRC the flavor of written Chinese is "written", i.e. it's separate from Mandarin, Cantonese, Sechuan, et all -- although it's closest to Mandarin.

Proper written Chinese(or formal) is quite different from spoken form. Although if you write as you speak people will still understand(especially if you're a mandarin speaker). As Tim said, written is closest to mandarin.

Dialect differences aside, the data sheets in Chinese are usually written with the simplified characters used on the mainland (and in Singapore), rather than the traditional characters commonly used in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. (Although I understand that those countries/regions are gradually using more of the simplified characters).

Many of the characters are very easy to "translate" (reducing the "word" radical ("yan2") from 7 strokes to 2, and the "door" radical ("men2") from 8 to 4 strokes simplifies whole classes of characters), but there are other characters that are greatly simplified beyond recognition such as the general measure word (no English equivalent) "ge4" (10 strokes to 3) or "book" ("shu1").

In the case of words such as "clock" ("zhong1"), a meaning-sound character, the complex "tong2" (child) part was just replaced with the simpler "zhong2" (middle) which more accurately matches the current sound and adds just as little to the meaning. Others such as "book" have lost some of the meaning (the "brush" part of the character, in turn built using "pig's head" has disappeared entirely).

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany