From: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Marc Brugui=E8res?= (marcbruguieres@ifrance.com)
Date: Tue Nov 15 2005 - 12:59:28 CST
Jörg Knappen:
> On Thu, 10 Nov 2005, Charles Levert wrote:
>
> > * On Thursday 2005-11-10 at 22:12:01 +0100, Philippe Verdy wrote:
> > > The "tréma" (french name for diaeresis, not for umlaut) can
> > > occur on all vowels, because its role in French is most often to avoid the
> > > creation of vocaling digraphs:
> >
> > But ä and ö are generally regarded as not being French.
> > Do you know of any words that are French or have been accepted as being
> > French that contain them? (I already mentioned the Maelström case.)
>
> There is the family name du Roscoät. This is the only example I can come
> up with.
I fail to understand why is this important for Unicode or truly internationalized software? These sets are strict minimum sets to write properly French texts. I would not be very interested in any software that only supported them but to write the most rudimentary texts. I thus find it a little pointless to see how many "ä" can be found in French (Roscoät is actually Breton).
In real life, French (English, German, Arabic, etc.) texts will contain many more characters than those in this list: all kinds of dashes, quotes, symbols, not to mention mathematical symbols, texts from other scripts, etc.
It is very easy to imagine many many texts in North Africa mixing Arabic and French scripts and in the future Tifinar, all this with a slew of diacritics (some commonly used in some transcriptions for all three scripts, see the Berber Centre transcriptions at the Langues orientales school which adopts the same generic diacritics across the 3 scripts for rare sounds).
I thought Unicode was supposed to open up all characters to us, not restrict us to small sets or a even a single script and some common punctuation and generic diacritics. Font repertoires are another subject, orthogonal to Unicode I would have thought.
-- Marc
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