Antoine Leca shcrissi (Sicilian, this time):
> Marco Cimarosti écrivit (!):
> That is true. It is as true as the fact that when we French
> are to write the oe digraph, we *type* it as two separate
> letters, for lack of better solutions.
The two issues are quite different.
- The lack of French "oe" letter is a limitation in the encoding, which
translates into a real spelling error. An equivalent issue in Italian (also
existing in French, BTW) was the lack of accented capital letters.
- The lack of properties such as superscript is a limitation in the
typographic capabilities (known as plain text vs. rich text). This also may
affect orthography, but in a less dramatic way.
> > So my question is: is the superscript attribute essential
> > in French [...] ?
>
> I am sure the situation in Italian is the same as for French:
> superscripts forms are preferred, but for lack of better
> solutions, baseline letters are understood (but surely it
> is annoying).
No, it is not. This is a key point to justify my proposal.
These kinds of abbreviations are never used on the baseline in Italian,
because they would not be understandable, not merely annoying.
I can only offer conjectures to explain this: perhaps it is because Italian
ordinal indicators are single letters (so, offer less context); perhaps it
is because one of them is "o" (which is easily confused with zero,
especially in some fonts); perhaps it is simply because people is not used
to see them spelled that way.
This is not to say that ordinal numbers cannot be written in other ways, of
course. There are of course other ways of abbreviating them (such as Roman
numerals, very common; or using "^" for both genders and numbers). I for one
prefer spelling out ordinal numbers in letters, especially if they are <=
100.
> > > Also, a large number of people (incorrectly) believe the form
> > > for second, third etc. is "2ème" rather than "2e" (in fact, if you
> > > look at examples in France, you will find about 75% of 2ème versus
> > > 25% of 2e...). This begs for additional "m" and "è" (U+00E0).
> >
> > I think I have seen 2nd, 3rd etc. written as "2me", "3me" etc.
>
> True, but it is rarer (and perhaps rarer these days than 2e 3e, since
> correct typography is spreading, thanks to computers and education
> of a number of people, including journalists!)
>
> You could also encounter 2ième, 3ièmes, etc. This is probably even
> more common than 2me, by the way.
>
>
> Ah! But when I said yes about "2me", I was implying the
> superscript form.
> I am not sure I ever saw 2me written like this, on a single baseline
> (OTOH, something like 2ième, or even 2-ième, is more often in baseline
> form than in superscript form).
I think I have seen "2me" written on the base line, but now I wonder whether
it really was on the street or on printed matter. Probably, I have seen it
on a computer.
But that still makes my point: Italians would not write "3o" etc., even in
an e-mail. If those superscript letters are not available, they are
substituted by something else entirely ("terzo", "III", etc.)
> > As I said above for French. The whole Catalan set is
> missing (apart the
> > casual "n", not in Latin 1), so does it make sense to add it?
>
> Outside computers, I never saw it written with the letter on
> the baseline.
Again: outside computers. I have never seen the Italian counterparts even
*inside* computers.
_ Marco
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