>Slovak or other alphabets do NOT have characters, they have
LETTERS! So one should rather say that CH is a LETTER in the
Slovak alphabet.
Character is just the more generic hypernym for letter, the
latter occurring only in alphabets (as opposed to syllabaries,
etc.). Diacritics are also considered characters, but they're
not usually considered letters. (But let's not get into any
debates about this, please.)
>Adam insists that "CH is a CHARACTER in the Slovak
alphabet"...
This is plain wrong!!!
It doesn't matter whether this is right or wrong. Nobody's
debating the status of "ch" in the Slovak alphabet because (a)
it's accepted that it needs to be treated as an entity for
certain processes, (b) what you *call* it (i.e. the element of
the orthography) is so subject to individual perceptions and
attitudes that there is no certainty that you'll get a
consistent answer, and (c) what you call it has absolutely no
bearing on what is required to develop algorithms for various
text processes that provide the desired results.
The remainder of your comments, Marco, were right on the money.
Peter
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