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?. I understand that until about 5 years ago there were some crank up telephones in use -- in West Virginia -- with telephone numbers that had 4N-1L-2N. Anyone got sharing on this one? There appears to be a return to two party lines in some areas because of shortage of lines. e.g . Round Rock, Texas, north of Austin, TX. Joe Tibiletti snipped-for-privacy@suddenlink.net [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: In the era 'before the time of dial phones', most international calls were routed manually through either White Plains, NY (to Europe) or Oakland, CA (far east and Pacific Islands) or Miami, FL (South American points) and Montreal, Quebec for Iceland, Greenland, northern polar points, etc. Your local operator was _not_ expected to know other languages, but the operators in those other cities were expected to have at least a smattering of knowledge about the languages they were dealing with. And when the AT&T operator said to the European operator (who had probably originally responded in her own native language) "this is White Plains (or Oakland) calling", typically the overseas operator would switch (sometimes in mid-stream) to English instead of whatever she _had_ been speaking. They would communicate in English with Oakland or White Plains, then 'toggle back and forth' between languages as they dealt with other operators in their country. Other country operators did not expect very much of AT&T in that respect. You notice I did not include the dozens of dialects of mostly French spoken in Africa. AT&T did not commect direct with Africa. Those cables were all the property of France Telecom, which guarded the cables and they only allowed calls from USA or Canada at certain specified times of day (usually during the night) and those calls were 'booked' by operators in Paris, France. AT&T had to hand off the call to the Paris operators.
Now, most international operator-assisted calls are routed through the Pittsburgh, PA IOC (International Operations Center of AT&T), and it is a lot the same way: A few operators can speak the most common other languages (Spanish, German, French) but most of them cannot, so when foreign city inward answers and hears, "Pittsburgh calling", they start speaking English when possible.
If there were crank telephones in use five years ago, it is news to me. I thought all of those vanished at least 20-25 years ago. Perhaps you are thinking of Nevada's toll stations, which were in use in a few areas of that state (and some remote areas in Idaho and California until sometime in the 1990's. PAT]