From: Marco Cimarosti (marco.cimarosti@essetre.it)
Date: Mon May 05 2003 - 06:35:18 EDT
António Martins-Tuválkin wrote:
> Last week I saw on TV (portuguese channel RTP2) a typo in the
> subtitles of an US movie; a spanish word in the original was
> kept in the translation, rendered with a n-diaeresis in lieu
> of a n-tilde.
In old DOS days, I remember having seen Portuguese written with <ä> and <ö>
in place of <ã> and <õ>. That was because DOS code page 437 lacked <ã> and
<õ> and, at low resolutions, dieresis and tilde looked quite similar to each
other.
My guess is that some misinformed designer of TV titling devices for the
Portuguese marked assumed that <¨> was a valid glyph variant for <~>, being
used to old DOS software, and drawn all tildes in the device's font as <¨>,
including the one on <ñ>.
Then, probably, someone complained about the odd shape of <ã> and <õ>, so
they got fixed. But no one complained loud enough for <ñ>, because that not
commonly seen in Portuguese, so it remained wrong.
_ Marco
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