Haruo, thanks for the pleasant and humorous response to my irrelevant post.

I'm interested in the Sgaw/Sqaw alternatives. In English, unvoiced sibilant consonants are not compounded with voiced consonants, so Sqaw seems easier to pronounce than Sgaw. But some languages, like Japanese, have consonants which have syllabic value. The only way I can see to pronounce Sgaw is sssgaw--the s being a separate syllable, whereas Sqaw is easily pronounced as skaw (I assume it isn't pronounced squaw). Romanizing of non-European languages is often strange and inaccurate, hence the several spellings of the Libyan president: Kadaffi, Qadaffi, Gadaffi,

The son of a friend of mine once worked with Doctors Without Borders crossing back and forth between Thailand and Burma/Myanmar.

Charles (trying for once to be relevant and to avoid thread creep.