Re: YADPT (D=Dutch)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jan van Steenbergen" <ijzeren_jan@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2003 6:51 AM
Subject: Re: YADPT (D=Dutch)


> --- Jean-François Colson skrzypszy:
>
> >> > > Yep. Luckily, Unicode includes the IJ as a single character :) .
> >
> >Does that mean that any unicode software should use them in the same way?
> >When I google for a Dutch word with a lange ij, the results are not the
> >same for e.g. "IJsland" (47500 pages) and "IJsland" (only 17 pages).
>
> I think there are two reasons for that. First of all, most of what's on
the
> internet dates not from before the computer age. But more importantly, our
> Dutch typewriters had no way of typing capitalised IJ as a digraph; AFAIK,
> only in non-capitalised form the digraph was used, and we were tought to
> type "IJsland" the way I just did.
OK for the 1st reason, but not for the 2nd.
If I google for a common not capitalized word such as "wijzen", I get the
following results:
wijzen (in 6 letters): 168000 pages;
wijzen (with a digraph): 59 pages.

To make a comparison with French (oui, je sais, comparaison n'est pas
raison), the oe ligature (œ) and the capital letters with acute, grave or
cedilla (ÉÀÈÙÇ) are not on the French and Belgian typewriters/keyboards. But
they are quite often used:
"mise en oeuvre" 609000 pages;
"mise en œuvre" 1110000 pages.
I think the main difference is that all those letters are included in
CP-1252 except the ij ligatures.


> And to be honest, the capital digraph looks ugly and unnatural to me.
But it is not uncommon and I like it. Last week again I saw a truck with a
capital broken U-like IJ, something like this:

*     *
*     *
*     *
*     *
*     *
      *
*     *
*     *
 *****

And to be honest too, the difference is generally visible (by the eye, not
by a program) only with monospaced fonts and fonts without well designed
kerning tables.

Jean-François Colson
jfcolson@belgacom.net