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.
Nope. Letters in the dial was not just an American thing. British dials had letters associated with numbers as well. (The exchange in London GROsvenor [470] or the exchange in Edinburgh, Scotland of CALedonian [225] or the number in Paris, France OPEra [473] as examples.) The letter/number association was a little different than that used in North American dials. 6 was MN (no O) with O sharing the position with 0. Also København (Copenhagen, Denmark) has some letters from the Danish alphabet on it as well. Paris, France also had number/letter combinations on early dials.
As far as letters on dials the ITU agreed that new dials/keypads would have ABC/2, DEF/3, GHI/4, JKL/5, MNO/6, PQRS/7, TUV/8 and WXYZ/9 with 1 and 0 having no letters associated with them.
In North America Northern Telecom/Nortel hasn't put "Operator" on the 0 key for many years.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Once again, the 8-bit characters did not render correctly in this message. PAT]