From: Kevin Brown (graphity@adelaide.on.net)
Date: Sat Apr 26 2003 - 08:54:36 EDT
>> I had understood that E WITH DIAERESIS was required in Dutch.
>
>Yes, and some other letters with diaereses and circumflexes. But
>those are not part of our "basic" alphabet, and most of the time, we
>hardly notice if an accent mark is missing, even though formally a
>missing accent mark may result in a different word (a bit like the
>difference between resume and rÈsumÈ in English), which is a rare
>occasion anyway.
As well as being optionally used in Dutch, the E WITH DIAERESIS is also
used for French, Albanian, Cyrillic and Welsh.
Is there a database anywhere that cross-references Latin-based glyphs (eg
E WITH DIAERESIS) to all the Latin-based writing systems they're used in
(eg Dutch, French, Albanian, Cyrillic and Welsh) and vice versa? It would
be really useful.
Obviously this is not required in the few cases where languages have
their own sub-range eg Lithuanian, Romanian etc but the vast majority of
latin-based writing systems are all merged together under Basic Latin,
Latin 1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B and Latin Extended
Additional.
The Names List is of limited use - for instance if you search for "Dutch"
you get "0133 LATIN SMALL LIGATURE IJ" - but it's not exhaustive ie you
don't also get "E WITH DIAERESIS".
Kevin Brown
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