Re: Question about "do"

Mark J. Reed wrote:


> On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 10:48:04AM -0500, Carlos Thompson wrote:
> > > I always like coming across things written in Spanish where instead of
> > > having a tilde on the |eñe|, they have a rising accent just like on
the
> > > vowels.
> >
> > Do you mean something like {ń}.
>
> Note that folks without Unicode support won't see that character, whereas
the
> ñ character only requires the much more common Latin-1 character set.
Which I am aware of.  The first thing I did, when replaying to Steg, was to
change my mail settings to send UTF-8.

Well. when writing on screan in most modern computers sold in Western Europa
and the Americas (Latin-1 zone), an n-tilde is easier to get than an
n-acute.

On the other hand, in printing, and mainly in pre-Latin-1 times (both
computer-aided and computerless printing (press)), unless the printer/press
was optimized for Spanish use, neither n-tilde or n-acute would be possible
in an easy way.  Equally for acuted vowels.  But if you figure out how to
write an acuted vowel, you will as easily write an acuted n.

Typewriters are a good example of this.  A typewriter optimizes for
languages like French and Swedish might have a deaf key for acute accent
mark you can use over vowels (or any other letter), while they may lack a
similar deaf key for the tilde accent mark, and they will surely lack a key
for the <ñ>.  So an n-acute becomes easier than an n-tilde.


-- Carlos Th

Replies