On Mon, 30 Aug 1999 11:45:28 -0700 (PDT) Kenneth Whistler wrote:
> First, the non-spacing mark first model is derivative from old
> keyboard technology, as others have pointed out. The habit of
> typing a diacritic first on a dead key, and then the baseform,
> was dictated by the constraints of typewriter design, and not by
> any natural considerations for the way people write their scripts.
My mother even has an old typewriter (a Remington?) at home where
the diacritic marks are placed on kinked levers such that they
would hit the paper one place left of the current character cell.
With this machine one would type the baseform first and then
apply the diacritic mark. I guess they wanted to emulate the way
most people write by hand.
Robert
----------------------
Robert Herzog
LHC division, CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics)
1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland
email: Robert.Herzog@cern.ch, tel: +41 22 76 79583
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:51 EDT