From: Tom (applemeister@f2s.com)
Date: Wed Sep 24 2008 - 14:24:18 CDT
Since we're on the subject of two letters being treated as one, I
thought I'd add my 2 pence worth.
Spanish (regardless of localisation/dialect) treats the strings 'll'
and 'rr' as single letters. Historically (up until about 1996, if
memory serves), 'ch' was also considered to be a letter in its own
right.
The interesting thing to note, however, is that despite their letter
status, words beginning with 'll' and 'ch' are not required to have
both elements written in uppercase (no word in Spanish begins with
'rr'). For example neither Checo (Spanish for 'Czech') nor the town of
Lloret were ever written as 'CHeco' or 'LLoret', respectively.
I must say, André, you really opened my eyes about the use of digraphs
in Slovak and Hungarian; I had no idea they existed in those languages!
Just my observation (and my first post, despite having joined the list
several months ago!)
Tom
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An Apple a day keeps Microsoft away
Second Lt. Applemeister of the 68k Macintosh Liberation Army
On 24 Sep 2008, at 10:26, André Szabolcs Szelp wrote:
> Jeroen,
>
>> Well, last I checked the schools still teach to write ij as ij and
>> not as two
>> separate letters.
>> Could be that 'they' (whoever they may be) state that to
>> accommodate the
>> multitude of US English keyboards present in the Netherlands you
>> have to use
>> i and j and that ij is a compatibility character. I have no clue
>> about that.
>>
>> That would mean what is used and what is taught are quite distinct.
>
> Also all the digraphs (and the one trigraph) cs, dz, dzs, gy, ly ny,
> sz, ty, zs) are taught to be own, distinct letters in Hungarian (in
> school. And they are considered such by the official orthography of
> the Hungarian Academy of Sciences as well). Nevertheless, they are
> represented as two characters in electronic (and otherwise) text. This
> is not a contradiction.
>
> letter != character
>
> A digraph is exactly this: one grapheme (which might or might not be
> considered a letter by a given orthography: consider Dutch ij and
> Hungarian sz, cs,... Slovak ch [considered an own letter] vs. English
> ch, sh,... and German ch, sch,... [not considered a letter]) which is
> represented by more than one character.
>
> I know about the casing tradtion of IJ ( IJssel, e.g., as you put it),
> though as I am said this is only Netherlands-Dutch, but not
> Belgian-Dutch typographic/orthographic tradition.
>
> You can write IJssel with I+J (as separate characters) without a
> problem :)
>
>
> Anyway, I wanted to thank Karl for clarifying issues. This is
> perfectly reasonable. I just was not aware about the range of
> applications and validity of the proposed keyboard standard.
>
> Szabolcs
>
>
>
> --
> Szelp, André Szabolcs
>
> +43 (650) 79 22 400
>
>
>
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