From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Mon May 26 2003 - 19:49:09 EDT
Pim Blokland <pblokland at planet dot nl> wrote:
> My feelings at this moment are that if you do want to make the
> difference clear, write U+0133 for the "normal" ij sound and i+j for
> when it's supposed to be two letters, and don't use any tricks such
> as non-joiners.
I thought the last time we had this discussion, there was more or less
agreement among the experts that we should NOT be encouraging the use of
the U+0132 and U+0133 for new text. They aren't canonical equivalents
of I+J and i+j, only compatibility equivalents, so not all text
processes will be expected to match them with the I+J and i+j that
people have been using to type Dutch for decades.
Furthermore, they aren't available on most keyboards, so end users might
find this suggestion a bit difficult to implement.
U+0132 and U+0133 are present in Unicode because they were present in
existing character encodings, with which a one-to-one mapping was
considered desirable. They are not present to encourage ambiguous
spellings of Dutch words.
Instead of encouraging the continued (or resurgent) use of U+0132 and
U+0133, we should teach our text-processing software to titlecase I+J
and i+j "correctly" in a Dutch context (denoted by whatever means;
previously I would have suggested Plane 14 language tags). As a second
priority, software should recognize any existing instances of U+0132 and
U+0133 as equivalent to I+J and i+j in searching and sorting.
Recognizing such equivalences is not the same thing as encouraging
continued use of the compatibility characters.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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