CHAT: digraphs vs. diacritics (was:Umberto Eco and Esperanto)

At 16:44 +0200 13.6.1999, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
>> Date:         Sun, 13 Jun 1999 01:45:47 -0500
>> From: Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
>>
>> Question:  About this, and German's, <ue> convention, does actual <ue>
>> not exist in German?  Because it seems to me that if it did, there could
>> be confusion over whether <ue> meant <u"> or "really" <ue>,
>
>I'm sure it does --- but probably only a few instances are likely to
>cause serious confusion. It's just some more cases where you have to
>know what the word means to pronounce it.
>
>People use the same convention in Danish --- ae oe aa for =E6 =F8 =E5, and
And some people use aa ae oe for =E5 =E4 =F6 in Swedish.  I think that apart=
 from
us that used to read teleprinter news when abroad it is a little less
well-known here than in Denmark and Norway -- and perhaps not as easily
"reinvented" since we did not use aa orthographically as recently, and
because we don't have the =E6 (&aelig;) graph.  There are a couple of
possible ambiguities with "real" oe, but i think all are disambiguated by
context.

Currently we have a fad of "Anglicization" by stripping the diacritics. Yech=
!
One bank had to re-Sueticize its spelling IOT not losing its private
savers, but apart from that the silly fad goes on...

>I'm only aware of one bad ambiguity --- but it's real bad, OTOH:
>
>        sukkerr=F8r "sugar canes" vs. sukkerroer "sugar beets"
But I suppose you could write sukkerro'er for the latter? -- at least
foreign words ending in -a and -o seem to get an apostrophe plural quite
regularly in Danish.

>
>Apart from that, I think most people get used to reading the stuff
>very quickly. It's certainly better than downconverting to a o a as
>some mailers will do.
Yes, I have no problem reading it, whereas "stripped" diacritics makes
texts virtually unreadable.

>
>Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marke=
d)


 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  B.Philip Jonsson  <bpj@...> <melroch@...>

        Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
                                            (Tacitus)