From: Antoine Leca (Antoine10646@leca-marti.org)
Date: Tue Nov 15 2005 - 06:23:33 CST
On Monday, November 14th, 2005 17:27Z, Mark Davis wrote:
> 1b. Similarly, if the letter 'z' were only ever used in the
> combination 'tz', then we might have
>
> [a-y {tz}]
>
> (The language would probably have plain 'z' in the auxiliary set, for
> use in foreign words.)
What do you mean by 'foreign words' here?
I mean, in (present day) Catalan, Y does not appear alone, it always follows
N as NY digraph (which is the same as Castilian Ñ). As a result, I may
expect the "regular" set to be
[a à b c ç d e é è f g h i í ï j l {l·l} m n {ny} o ó ò p {qu} r s t u ú ü v
x z]
(I have read about Mark's advice about QU, but you can comment on the other
peculiarities).
However, when it comes to 'foreign' words, we have several cases:
For example, km is officially written «quilometre» (and so on for everything
that you will 'naturally' write with K), but you will often encounter
«kilometre», so I guess K should be in the auxiliary set.
More marginal, W.-C. is supposed to be written «vater», while the most used
is «water» (I know this will look funny, particularly in Germany ;-)); but
it is about the only word so spelled currently, so I cannot decide if W
should go into the auxilliary set or not.
When you come to the case above, even if proper nouns are supposed to be
re-written using the normal letters, fact is Sr. Múñoz is likely to keep its
Ñ, and M. Verdy is likely to keep its Y... Again, this raises the question
about whether Ñ and Y should go into the auxilliarly set?
And the Å of Åland?
Or does the rule for the auxilliary set would include any base letter for
the languages often mixed with genuine content (in case of Catalan,
Castilian Spanish, Basque and English at the least; perhaps French but in
this very case I see that Πis generally not used, since it is not on the
keyboards... but OTOH we can encounter Noël... if we dig a lot, that is.)
I guess a similar case could be made for Italian (where I was taught J, K, W
were not part of the regular alfabeto), Latin, and probably quite a bit
more.
Or should we rather eat the whole beef, and state that for Latin based
languages, A-Z would be part of the regular set at any rate, since it stands
on the keyboards, is used for ISO symbols and English names, and so on...
Antoine
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