From: Martin Heijdra (mheijdra@princeton.edu)
Date: Tue Apr 29 2003 - 09:50:14 EDT
This message I referred to went astray (wrong list chosen). Part 1 has now
been brought up by others as well; it's issue 2 which has not been
considered. It's more of a font than encoding issue, but still, there is no
adequate support anywhere yet...
Comments from yet another Dutch speaker:
1. Dutch typewriters usually do have an ij/IJ key, although my guess is most
would use i+j and I+J anyway. Sorting, of course, usually treats ij/IJ as
equivalent to (and therefore interspersed with) y/Y, but also that is not
always the case. Reference works often state explicitly what they do with
ij/IJ.
2. IF an ij/IJ is considered not just for backward compatibility, the issue
of *accented ij* comes into play.
Dutch rules of accent can be, perhaps, classified into three:
1. those *required* for Dutch itself, such as the diaresis (pace Pim: if
such accents are left out the word may sometimes remain "readable", but is
spelled uncorrectly according to any possible spelling rule): zeeëgel etc.
2. loanwords with accents from other countries, such as many French or
German loanwords: French/German accents are usually maintained, much more
frequently than in English, but not in all cases by every user. (Accents
from other languages, say Swedish, are left out earlier, especially those
usually unavailable on the typewriter.) Books and magazines will regularly
maintain such accents, but there are occasions where they are left out
(e.g., bad computer fonts/programs/keyboards...) Acutes, graves,
circumflexes, cedillas, umlauts in German words can therefore be considered
necessary also for Dutch.
3. accents (grave and acute) on vowels for emphasis. This is never
necessary, since their presence denotes emphasis only; yet, they are used
quite often and normally in especially literary texts (but rarely, e.g., in
book titles, or newspaper articles--any analysis based upon newspapers would
severely underestimate this practice). The decision to use grave or acute
usually depends on pronunciation of the vowel, but in some cases could be
either. (néé, nóg, tòch, wèg). Since typewriters have the acute and grave,
there was no problem to type this. Usage on capitals are rare indeed, but
not at all impossible to imagine.
Here the ij becomes an issue. Since it is considered a vowel, it used to be
that both the i and j were accented with the acute, and a typewriter (and
type) could do that. (zíjn, with j-acute as well). However, both accented j
and ij have not existed on computers for ages now, and the official spelling
rules now explicitly say that, IF a word processor or other program cannot
handle an accented j in the ij combination, it is OK to only accent the i,
and that is what many books now do. (I would consider ij with grave accent
not occurring, but who knows...)
Since it is my firm contention that computers should follow original usage,
not dictate it, I think it is time for fonts (if not necessarily encoding)
to allow for j/J-acute, and, if ij is considered to be a perfectly good
equivalent to i+j, also ij/IJ acute.
Martin Heijdra
Martin Heijdra
Chinese Bibliographer
East Asian Library and the Gest Collection
Frist Campus Center, Room 317
Princeton University
33 Frist Campus Center
Princeton, NJ 08544 USA
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Apr 29 2003 - 10:57:44 EDT