gadfly@ihuxn.UUCP (Gadfly) (01/01/70)
--
Vis-a-vis the Danes' addition of {oA} to the alphabet to supersede
the use of double-a, I heard that when this happened (this century),
all people with names beginning "Aa..." got their choice of leaving
them as they were or respelling them with the {oA}. Going with
the new letter meant moving from the beginning of the phone book
(and any other alphabetized list) to the end.
--
*** ***
JE MAINTIENDRAI ***** *****
****** ****** 15 Aug 85 [28 Thermidor An CXCIII]
ken perlow ***** *****
(312)979-7753 ** ** ** **
..ihnp4!iwsl8!ken *** ***steven@boring.UUCP (01/01/70)
In article <6582@boring.UUCP> jack@boring.UUCP (Jack Jansen) writes: > It seems that the latin alphabet is insufficient to almost all languages, > and that three solutions have been chosen by different > languages: ... > 3. Somebody Else's Problem. This means to just use the letters you > kind of like for a sound you need, and let other people worry > about how to pronounce them. As far as I know, English is the only > language that adopted this solution. Two simple examples of the > fun this gives : gaol == jail, laughter != slaughter. Here are some examples from Dutch: balletje (=little ball) != balletje (=little ballet) waarderen != goederen ^^^^ ^^^^ shag = cheque
storm@diku.UUCP (Kim Fabricius Storm) (07/31/85)
In article <775@mcvax.UUCP> aeb@mcvax.UUCP (Andries Brouwer) writes: >Last time I just mentioned a few accents that occurred to me while >writing - let me now give a more detailed overview of what accents >exist. >- Corona (circle above) (o) is found in Scandinavian oa and Czech ou . ^^ >Various ligatures are conventionally treated as a single symbol. >One has Dutch ij , German ss (or sz), French oe and >Scandinavian (and Latin) ae . ^^ >Some symbols with a crossbar are >Polish /l and /L ; Scandinavian /o and /O ; ... ^^ As a Dane, I would like to point out some misunderstandings in your article. If not a misunderstanding, then somebody is completely ignorant of facts! According to my knowledge ae /o and oa (marked with ^^ in the extract) are NOT an 'a-e ligature', an 'o with a crossbar' or an 'a with a circle above' - they are genuine letters in the danish alphabet: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V (W) X Y Z AE /O oA (please observe the ordering of the letters.) I don't think you can show me any danish dictionary, in which AE /O and oA don't have their own sections far away from those of A E and O! I have seen a few american books with a Danish summary at the end, e.g. Brinch-Hansen: The Architecture of Concurrent Programs, where it is obvious that the publisher has treated AE /O and oA as special cases of A E and O, as in your list; the result is terrible, and if that is what we can expect from future versions of troff then ... UURGH! It might be ok for a short summary in Danish... But not a whole book, please! Please don't correct me about troff - I know that one can map the proper letters into the fonts, if they are available in the printer, but I would not like to see a version of troff in Denmark claiming to have a Danish alphabet, if it is made with a-e ligatures, / on O's and a scaled down 'o' on top of A's! BTW: As indicated above W is not always considered a genuine letter in Danish. in danish W only occurs in a few personal names and in foreign words, and in most dictionaries it is treated just as if it was a V. >I would be thankful if people mailed me their additions and corrections. If you still persist in calling AE a ligature, then I would suggest that you included w (or vv) as a ligature too; according to your rules, any letter that COULD be composed by other 'normal' (english?) letters, should be considered a ligature. Any objections from the people conserned should of course be ignored! Treating W as a ligature also has the great advantage, that the character becomes available for general purpose use, e.g. as delimiter or escape character. This is consistent with the use of {|} and [\], which unfortunately are used for the Danish letters ae /o oa AE /O and oA - C-programs are great fun :-( to edit on my terminal, you wouldn't believe it was C if you saw it! ---- Kim F. Storm, DIKU, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
andersa@kuling.UUCP (Anders Andersson) (08/02/85)
AE This goes to both net.text and net.nlang, and currently I think this AA AE cross-posting is appropriate. Probably it won't be at a later time... AA In article <1087@diku.UUCP> storm@diku.UUCP (Kim Fabricius Storm) writes: >According to my knowledge ae /o and oa (marked with ^^ in the extract) are NOT >an 'a-e ligature', an 'o with a crossbar' or an 'a with a circle above' - they >are genuine letters in the danish alphabet: > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V (W) X Y Z AE /O oA I was about to bring up almost the same question. However, I wasn't sure whether this part of the problem is within the scope of the discussion, and I don't think anyone has actually claimed that these "ligatures", "umlauts" etc. really are less important versions of other characters in all languages concerned. So far only their visual representation has been considered. Just for anyone's information, here is the Swedish alphabet also: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V (W) X Y Z oA "A "O Note the different ordering in the end. The same for Finnish I guess, except that they don't have oA. >in danish W only occurs in a few personal names and in foreign words, and in >most dictionaries it is treated just as if it was a V. The same in Swedish. However, I think 'E and "U should be mentioned together with W, as they also show up sometimes in personal names. 'E is treated like E, and "U like Y. If our intention is to create some digital representation of European written language in a wider sense, and not just those funny graphical things, then we have to look into this problem as well, yes. And when we refer to text formatters, this will most likely be the case, I guess... 1. Different alphabets simply sort their letters differently. 2. Various languages put different "value" in the letters they use. In the Scandinavian languages, "A and "O (or their correspondants) are "real" letters, while in German they are not, just "umlauts". This might effect sorting, in that they are "treated as" some other letters. I would be glad to receieve some Frenchman's veiw on their myriad of accents! 3. There might be slight differences in the printed representation. In handwriting, I might use tilde (~) instead of double-dot (") over A and O, but when I started writing in German, my teacher pointed out that I should not use tilde on the "umlauts". 4. Try to define an international case conversion function when there are only two representations of I (with and without dot). "International" means that it should work properly in both Paris and Ankara. I don't think we can count on that a single text is "written" in one language only, and thus make general assumptions on how to treat the letters. For instance, when sorting a list of personal names: Should G"unther be put before or after Gustaf? Or just think of a world atlas! Note to the eventual implementors: Please reserve some place where we could later put an escape sequence to switch over to an entirely different alphabet -- soon we will want to write in Greek, Hebrew or even Bulgarian... Anders Andersson ...!seismo!mcvax!enea!kuling!andersa
esa@kvvax4.UUCP (Esa K Viitala) (08/06/85)
In article <kuling.777> andersa@kuling.UUCP (Anders Andersson) writes: >Just for anyone's information, here is the Swedish alphabet also: > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V (W) X Y Z oA "A "O >Note the different ordering in the end. The same for Finnish I guess, >except that they don't have oA. Oh, but the Finns do. Not all the Finns like it but it is there, the ordering is the same as above, though. (There are some 6-8% Swedish speaking citizens in Finland, and Swedish is an official language in Finland, too.) In Norwegian the ordering is the same as in Danish: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V (W) X Y Z AE /O oA but Norwegians treat double A (or double a) as oA (oa), which causes some additional problems to the sorting algorithm. (Maybe the Danes do it, too?) For instance the phone book lists surnames beginning with double A (Aa) together with names beginning with the *letter* oA. I.e. a name, say, 'Aasmundsen' will be listed after a name 'oAgren', but 'Aasmundsen' will be before 'oAsmundsen' and, of course 'Asmundsen' will be listed in the beginning of the book, under A. Got it? :-) :-). > >>in danish W only occurs in a few personal names and in foreign words, and in >>most dictionaries it is treated just as if it was a V. >The same in Swedish. That, I believe, is very much the same in Finland and in Norway. Norwegians are a bit more careless in adapting words from other languages though. Therefore, in Norwegian dictionary, one finds words such as 'whisky', 'wienerbr/od' and 'wagon', whereas Finns write 'viski', 'viinerleip"a' and 'vaunu'. Except that Finns rarely say 'viski', they prefer 'votka' :-) :-). -- ---ekv, {seismo,okstate,garfield,decvax,philabs}!mcvax!kvport!kvvax4!esa
tmb@talcott.UUCP (Thomas M. Breuel) (08/08/85)
In article <642@kvvax4.UUCP>, esa@kvvax4.UUCP (Esa K Viitala) writes: > In article <kuling.777> andersa@kuling.UUCP (Anders Andersson) writes: > >Just for anyone's information, here is the Swedish alphabet also: > > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V (W) X Y Z oA "A "O > >Note the different ordering in the end. > > In Norwegian the ordering is the same as in Danish: > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V (W) X Y Z AE /O oA > but Norwegians treat double A (or double a) as oA (oa), which > causes some additional problems to the sorting algorithm. German has special characters for the vowel combinations 'ae', 'oe', 'ue', and 'sz'. These were introduced as a matter of convenience in handwriting: the first three combinations ('Umlaute') are written as the first vowel with two small parallel lines on top (contracted to dots in printed matter), which is actually a small script 'e'. The consonant combination 'sz' is written as a 'beta' like character, which is a contracted form of the script combination of 's' and 'z'. In dictionaries, the umlaute are either found under the corresponding vowel, or under the corresponding vowel combinations. They are never listed separately. Likewise, for dictionary purposes, 'sz' is treated as 'ss'. It is considered acceptable in informal writing to spell out umlaute and to re-place the 'sz' character by 'ss' if the special characters are not available. (It is a sign of lack of knowledge, when, as I have seen quite frequently in texts prepared by speakers of English, the umlaute are replaced by plain vowels. This is annoying and hard to read!) Personally, I think the introduction of the umlaute and the 'sz' into German print was a mistake: they do not improve readability; there function is at most to make the print look nicer, much as letter combinations like 'ft' in certain English typefaces. I sincerely hope that they will disappear from the common written language. On the other hand, compared to Danish, Swedish, or Finnish, German at least does not have problems with ordering or representation in standard Roman letters. It is possible to write readable German without the use of diacritical marks, without special characters, and without changing the dictionary order in doing so. Diacritical marks, contracted letters, and special characters are not a sign of cultural identity -- they are annoying leftovers from a time in which people used to do most of their writing with a pen (or a brush, on the other side of the world). Let's hope they'll soon get out of fashion! Thomas.
storm@diku.UUCP (Kim Fabricius Storm) (08/09/85)
In article <642@kvvax4.UUCP> esa@kvvax4.UUCP (Esa K Viitala) writes: >In Norwegian the ordering is the same as in Danish: > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V (W) X Y Z AE /O oA >but Norwegians treat double A (or double a) as oA (oa), which >causes some additional problems to the sorting algorithm. (Maybe >the Danes do it, too?) Yes, aa and oa are treated alike in Danish also. In fact, oa was invented more than 100 years ago, as an abbreviation for the frequent use of double-a in Danish (and Norwegian and Swedish). But instead of having it as a diacritical mark on an A, it became a whole new letter in itself placed last in the alphabeth. >Norwegians are a bit more careless in adapting words from other >languages though. Therefore, in Norwegian dictionary, one finds >words such as 'whisky', 'wienerbr/od' and 'wagon', whereas Finns >write 'viski', 'viinerleip"a' and 'vaunu'. Danes are just as careless as the Norwegians - we also write whisky, wienerbr/od, and waggon (with two g's!). Kim F. Storm, U of Copenhagen, Denmark. storm@diku.UUCP
kimcm@diku.UUCP (Kim Christian Madsen) (08/09/85)
In article <642@kvvax4.UUCP> esa@kvvax4.UUCP (Esa K Viitala) writes: >In Norwegian the ordering is the same as in Danish: > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V (W) X Y Z AE /O oA >but Norwegians treat double A (or double a) as oA (oa), which >causes some additional problems to the sorting algorithm. (Maybe >the Danes do it, too?) For instance the phone book lists surnames >beginning with double A (Aa) together with names beginning with >the *letter* oA. I.e. a name, say, 'Aasmundsen' will be listed >after a name 'oAgren', but 'Aasmundsen' will be before >'oAsmundsen' and, of course 'Asmundsen' will be listed in the >beginning of the book, under A. Got it? :-) :-). We danes also, orders the the double A as oA, in fact in the old days the letter oA didn't exist in the danish alphabet, but I think it was officially introduced as a result of a writting reform in 1948. Regards Kim Chr. Madsen a.k.a. kimcm@diku.uucp
kimcm@diku.UUCP (Kim Christian Madsen) (08/09/85)
In article <642@kvvax4.UUCP> esa@kvvax4.UUCP (Esa K Viitala) writes: >In Norwegian the ordering is the same as in Danish: > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V (W) X Y Z AE /O oA Oh, I belive the norwegian alphabet must look this way: A B (C) D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V (W) X Y Z AE /O oA I've never seen any norwegian using the letter 'C' they seem to replace it by an 'S', like 'sentrum', 'sykel'... Regards Kim Chr. Madsen a.k.a. kimcm@diku.uucp
esa@kvvax4.UUCP (Esa K Viitala) (08/12/85)
In article <diku.1118> kimcm@diku.UUCP (Kim Christian Madsen) writes: >Oh, I belive the norwegian alphabet must look this way: > A B (C) D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V (W) X Y Z AE /O oA Hmmm, if continue along this line, then it really is A B (C) D E F G H I J K L M N O P (Q) R S T U V (W) (X) Y (Z) AE /O oA However, there are words listed under C. But some dictionaries do not have an entry for Q. X and Z have ususally very small entries, too. For Finnish I'd write the alphabet like this: A (B) (C) (D) E (F) (G) H I J K L M N O P (Q) R S T U V (W) (X) Y (Z) (oA) "A "O But one finds words starting with letters in parenthesis. At least in names. -- ---ekv, {seismo,okstate,garfield,decvax,philabs}!mcvax!kvport!kvvax4!esa
pooh@ut-sally.UUCP (Pooh @ the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen) (08/13/85)
In article <483@talcott.UUCP> tmb@talcott.UUCP (Thomas M. Breuel) writes: > >German has special characters for the vowel combinations 'ae', 'oe', >'ue', and 'sz'. These were introduced as a matter of convenience in >handwriting: the first three combinations ('Umlaute') are written >as the first vowel with two small parallel lines on top (contracted >to dots in printed matter), which is actually a small script 'e'. >The consonant combination 'sz' is written as a 'beta' like character, >which is a contracted form of the script combination of 's' and 'z'. Actually, I met extremely few Germans in West Germany who even knew what the word "Umlaut" meant. They just call the letters by their pronounced form. We're the ones who make a distinction between the letter and the diacritical mark. Pooh pooh@purdue-ecn.ARPA pur-ee!pooh "If there is a God, then He will reward you; and if there isn't, who has been playing all these games with Jacques Kohn?" -- Isaac Bashevis Singer
guido@boring.UUCP (08/13/85)
In Dutch, the alphabet is as follows: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X IJ Z :-)
jaap@mcvax.UUCP (Jaap Akkerhuis) (08/14/85)
In article <6574@boring.UUCP> guido@mcvax.UUCP (Guido van Rossum) writes: > In Dutch, the alphabet is as follows: > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X IJ Z > :-) Of course this hasn't to do anything any more with diacritical marks but more with "how to find a name in a dictionary". Of course guido isn't serious. But to explain the subtilities of the Dutch alphabet takes a while. There are basically three ways: The Dutch alfabet: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X IJ Z Note that Y isn't in the Dutch alfabet. The tolerant alphabet: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X IJ Y Z Here it is allowed to freely mix IJ and Y. The PTT alphabet: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Here the ligature is not considered as a special char, but as a combination of I and J. This according to the "Opperlandse taal-& letterkunde", Battus 1981. But of course, since the Dutch Post office changed the typography to something worse they changed also to the "Tolerant Alphabet", as I just found out. These ways of ordering makes thing rather amusing. In the nearest dictionary lying around (Prisma Nederlands-Engels...) I find IJsland under the "I" and in the phone book under "Y". jaap (mcavx!jaap) PS. How to phone Iceland from Holland? 09-354, costs ca. f 1,80 a minute. Write this down, you may need it.
andersa@kuling.UUCP (Anders Andersson) (08/17/85)
In article <483@talcott.UUCP> tmb@talcott.UUCP (Thomas M. Breuel) writes: >Diacritical marks, contracted letters, and special characters are >not a sign of cultural identity -- they are annoying leftovers from >a time in which people used to do most of their writing with a pen >(or a brush, on the other side of the world). Let's hope they'll >soon get out of fashion! I don't see why a certain feature in literal art should be annoying. EVERY letter is a "leftover" from earlier versions of that letter, not only those which fall apart when lifted from the paper... What do you say about "W" then? To me, it's a typical "double V" and is in Swedish properly handled as a kind of "V" (and why is it in English pronounced "double U"?). And if those periods are annoying, then we should perhaps remove them from "i" and "j" also? If the vast majority of all computers were produced in Russia, would you suggest giving up the "annoying" Latin/Roman alphabet and start writing Cyrillian? Anders Andersson ...!seismo!mcvax!enea!kuling!andersa
jack@boring.UUCP (08/18/85)
It seems that the latin alphabet is insufficient to almost all languages, and that three solutions have been chosen by different languages: 1. Take a letter that sounds fairly close to the needed letter, and put a funny sign on top of it. Example: German umlaut, Swedish oA, etc. 2. Take 2 letters that, when pronounced very fast after each other, have some similarity to the wanted sound, and decree that, when seen together, they sound different from usual. Example: au,ou,eu in Dutch, ng in Dutch and English. This has the advantage of not needing more letters, but the disadvantage that it creates ambiguities: 'engrave' is pronounced as en-grave, not eng-rave. 3. Somebody Else's Problem. This means to just use the letters you kind of like for a sound you need, and let other people worry about how to pronounce them. As far as I know, English is the only language that adopted this solution. Two simple examples of the fun this gives : gaol == jail, laughter != slaughter. Now, anyone know why certain languages chose to use the solutions they did? -- Jack Jansen, jack@mcvax.UUCP The shell is my oyster.
tmb@talcott.UUCP (Thomas M. Breuel) (08/18/85)
In article <6582@boring.UUCP>, jack@boring.UUCP writes: > It seems that the latin alphabet is insufficient to almost all languages, > and that three solutions have been chosen by different > languages: What do you mean by insufficient? If you want a one-phoneme-one-letter correspondence, it is probably insufficient even to represent Latin itself. As a mnemonic notation for natural language it is sufficient for practically any spoken language. > 1. Take a letter that sounds fairly close to the needed letter, and > put a funny sign on top of it. Example: German umlaut, Swedish > oA, etc. NO. THE GERMAN UMLAUT IS *NOT* A LETTER WITH A FUNNY SIGN ON TOP OF IT. The German umlaut is a combination of a vowel and an 'e', which was contracted to two little lines on top of the vowel in handwriting and later in print. Don't ever just drop the two dots/lines. Write the 'e' out if you must, i.e. 'A"' is 'Ae', 'o"' is 'oe', &c. Likewise, 'B' (sharp s) is written out as 'ss' (although 'sz' would be more logical). > 2. Take 2 letters that, when pronounced very fast after each other, > have some similarity to the wanted sound, and decree that, when > seen together, they sound different from usual. Example: au,ou,eu > in Dutch, ng in Dutch and English. This has the advantage of not > needing more letters, but the disadvantage that it creates > ambiguities: 'engrave' is pronounced as en-grave, not eng-rave. Ambiguity only if you insist on 1-1 correspondence between individual letters and pronounciation, which is present in *no* language that uses anything like a character oriented writing system. Also, German has several letter combinations that denote special consonants and are not even close in pronounciation to the individual letters that they consist of, e.g. 'sch' ('sh'), 'ch' ('kh'), 'st' ('sht'). No ambiguity or confusion occurs, however. > 3. Somebody Else's Problem. This means to just use the letters you > kind of like for a sound you need, and let other people worry > about how to pronounce them. As far as I know, English is the only > language that adopted this solution. Two simple examples of the > fun this gives : gaol == jail, laughter != slaughter. English spelling is not that problematic. You will always have to do work to learn a written language and its correspondence to a spoken language. A purely phonetic notation is impractical except for dictionaries. Have you ever tried to read something out aloud purely by phonetic notation? I challenge you! You won't be able to, even in a language as simple (phonetically) as Japanese. Thomas.
mmar@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP (Mitchell Marks) (08/22/85)
[Naw, I don't really believe there's a line-eater.] really believe there's a line-eater. [] I've already had my say on the issue involved here (I don't think it's unreasonable for people to want computers and terminals that implement their national alphabets). So in the following I am not pursuing that top-level argument; but I do think it's time to attend to some of the facts and claims that have come up. > NO. THE GERMAN UMLAUT IS *NOT* A LETTER WITH A FUNNY SIGN ON TOP OF IT. > The German umlaut is a combination of a vowel and an 'e', which was > contracted to two little lines on top of the vowel in handwriting and > later in print. Don't ever just drop the two dots/lines. Write the 'e' > out if you must, i.e. 'A"' is 'Ae', 'o"' is 'oe', &c. I'll take your word for it, if you're talking about the history of the orthography. But if you mean something phonological, the umlaute do not indicate diphthongs. They are single vowel sounds. In general there _is_ a relation between an umlaut and (one of) the sound(s) represented by the corresponding letter without the umlaut mark, namely that it is fronted. For example, u is a high back rounded vowel, and ue (I'll write it your way, in the traditional alternate spelling) is a high _front_ rounded vowel. Only in an obscure metaphorical way is it a combination of the plain vowel and e. Even if the writer is talking about orthography only, it's still a little odd to say that an umlaut vowel *is* the plain vowel + e. So we have the following: 1. Phonologically, an umlaut is not a combination of vowel + e, nor indeed any `combination' at all. 2. Orthographically, the umlaute were once written exclusively as the sequence vowel + e. 3. Now they are primarily written as single characters. These characters could be regarded, for graphic purposes, as combinations of a plain vowel and a diacritic; the writer above urges that conceptually they should be so considered. His point is reasonable insofar as it is based on matters like alphabetization sequence; but it does not have a basis in points 1 and 2. 4. The sequence of plain vowel + e has been retained as a traditional alternate way of spelling the umlaute. I suggest that the writer should concentrate on point 4 as the basis for his claim that there is no need to implement graphic umlaute on terminals, and avoid fuzzy mystic claims that the umalute ``really are'' sequences. > 2. Take 2 letters that, when pronounced very fast after each other, > have some similarity to the wanted sound, and decree that, when > seen together, they sound different from usual. Example: au,ou,eu > in Dutch, ng in Dutch and English. This has the advantage of not > needing more letters, but the disadvantage that it creates > ambiguities: 'engrave' is pronounced as en-grave, not eng-rave. I basically agree with this writer about why we use the orthographic sequence `ng' for this sound (voiced velar nasal consonant, henceforth referred to by the name for its symbol, `engma'). Pronounced quickly as a sequence, it does have a resemblance to the desired sound. Indeed, sometimes it does represent a sequence of sounds -- but that's engma+g, not n + g. (Just as orthographic `nk' in English usually indicates the sequence of sounds engma + k.) You can hear the difference by comparing `finger' and `singer'(the former is a sequence, the latter is plain engma). In the particular example the writer mentions, in my speech `engrave' has a sequence engma + g, not n + g; it's hard to find a real n + g in English, as we almost always will velarize an /n/ in the presence of a following velar stop (/k/ or /g/). Another way of explaining why we find that sequence a reasonable way of spelling that single sound is that the sound combines features of the two sounds most commonly indicated by the letters involved: it takes the nasality of the /n/ and the backness of the /g/. A similar claim could be made about the umlaute: they combine the height and rounding of the base vowel and the frontness of the `e'. > Nasalised 'n' is > written as 'ng'. Pardon me? What is 'nasalised n'? /n/ is already a nasal consonant, you can't make it more nasal. If you're talking about changing the point of articulation, you might want the terms 'palatalised' (but not for /n/ in English or German -- this is the `gn' in French `agneau') or 'velarised' (for engma), or the more general `backed' or `retracted'. I don't mean to be a fussbudget over terminology as much as this looks; I'm just as happy with a clear description in any terms, but nasalising a nasal can only confuse people. > > English is one of the feuu languages that can get by uuithout adding to > > that alphabet (and one of the feuu that uses all of it), but only > > because uue're prepared to put up uuith such a loose connection > > betuueen sound and symbol. I iust don't belieue it uuould euen be > > possible to deuise *usable* orthographies for the many languages of the > > uuorld that relied on combinations of letters rather than special > > letters and diacritics. > > Given how complicated orthography is in English, people are doing very > well. In fact, English is one of the easiest languages to learn. > Therefore, even if a spelling reform that eliminates all national > characters would complicate the orthography slightly (which I strongly > doubt), it would probably not harm the language too much. But if a > government undertook the task of a spelling reform with the goal of > eliminating national characters, they would at the same time probably > also correct some unrelated spelling problems, which would improve > rather than worsen matters. Ah, but this is an element that wasn't evident in the previous postings. We didn't quite reach this question when some discussion of spelling reform went around a few weeks ago, but I agree with the second writer that using letter sequences under fixed conventions would be a much more reasonable approach than striving for a one-sound-one-symbol method. But why call upon languages that already have a wealth of symbols to give that up? Surely not just for the convenience of computer technology. Wait a few years until technology has worked its way around to handling these symbols more easily than at present, and then look for a spelling reform based on the real needs and resources of your language. In the meantime, in the absence of general spelling reform throughout a country, don't ask the people who use computers to adopt a different alphabet and spelling from the one in general use by their compatriots. [Sorry, it seems I _am_ commenting on the top-level issue after all.] > Why am I arguing about this at all? The existence of national > characters is a problem: it requires special equipment and impedes > trade and information exchange. I have experienced these problems > myself (being German), and I believe that the most reasonable solution > is to eliminate national characters rather than to live with the > burden, unless such an elimination is linguistically unacceptable, as > in the case of Chinese or Japanese. If there are such linguistic > reasons in the case of the Scandinavian languages, I would like to hear > about them. Mere flaming or insistence is not going to help anyone. I don't know if the writer would consider them `linguistic reasons', but some pretty good reasons have come through the net. Let me try to reconstruct the argument I was relying on in short form above. 1. There may or may not be a real need for spelling reform in a given language. 2. If you think spelling reform should aim at a one-sound-one-symbol matchup, you are then committed to an enlargement of the symbol-set, for most languages. Even if you agree (as I do) that one-sound-one- symbol is not a reasonable basis for spelling reform in some languages (and that sequences fixed by convention are one group of useful tools), still you have little reason to diminish the resources of the extant symbol-set. 3. There will be many interest groups involved in spelling reform, and it's quite premature to assume that the convenience of computer users should be the highest-priority factor. 4. In the absence of general spelling-reform in a country, it is reasonable for users of computer equipment to want to have available the same alphabet and spelling as their compatriots use for all other purposes. 5. Nonetheless, there is and would remain a real problem of compatibility in international exchange. A partial solution is to embrace an extended character-set to include many or all of the `extra' characters. (That is, characters extra to the basic Latin alphabet. This suggestion does not imply that one and the same system should try to handle radically different entire alphabets.) 6. The proposal in point 5 doesn't solve the ordering problem; but then neither does the proposal to use only sequences of the 26-letter alphabet. To clarify point 6, consider Spanish. I hope you will agree that spelling in that language is in pretty good shape; you might not like some aspects, but there is no burning need for general reform. If we don't consider accented vowels as distinct characters (they don't affect ordering), there is only one character (~n) outside the 26-letter alphabet. (The ~n could be formed, like the accented vowels, by overprinting ASCII characters; but it's still a distinct letter for alpabetisation.) Even so, there's an ordering problem. Some two-letter sequences are treated (at least in some countries) as distinct letters for ordering purposes. As best I recall, the order goes like this: a b c ch d e f g h i j (k) l ll m n ~n o p q r rr s t u v (w) x y z The ordering applies not just at the beginning of words, but wherever the pair comes up within a word or name. Now, what seems most reasonable?-- A. Expect everybody throughout the Spanish-writing world to adopt a uniform single-letter-at-a-time ordering principle, for all purposes and contexts. B. Expect them to use some listings etc ordered on the traditional basis, and others (generated by computer) ordered on a single- letter-at-a-time basis. C. Expect software sources to provide sorting methods sophisticated enough to handle the traditional order. B is pretty damn inconvenient, but I suppose it's not out of the question. I think that A _is_ out of the question. The language is not in general need of spelling reform. And the ordering principle, frustrating as it may be for computer users, reflects an underlying reality; it's not just strange tradition. So basically we're left with C; and I don't think it's asking too much. -- -- Mitch Marks @ UChicago ...ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!mmar