>> I raise the question, what does the telephone dial look like in areas
>> with alphabets different fron our own, such as Cairo, Egypt, or
>> Beijing, China, or Oslo, Norway? Before the time of dial phones, how
>> did operators communicate with multi lengual populations?.
> It's my understanding that the addition of letters on the dial is
> mostly an American thing, and European phones don't generally have
> them at all. I expect this is similar in most of the countries you
> mention, although I found a web page that mentioned that Russian
> phones used to have cyrillic letters on them, but they don't any more.
European mobile phones do -- they use text messaging too.
My recollection is that desk phones have numbers. A search at
formatting link
found several phones with numbers clearly shown; for example, a "Téléphone ancien année 1950" where 2=ABC 3=DEF
4=GHI 5=JKL 6=MN 7=PRS 8=TUV 9=WXY.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Unfortunatly, the 8-bit characters were impossible to correctly render in this message. PAT]