From: Richard Wordingham (richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com)
Date: Mon Jun 12 2006 - 14:47:56 CDT
Philippe Verdy wrote on Monday, June 12, 2006 2:26 PM
> Wow! If the Unicode standard which is accurate for Standard English
Is it?
> deviates from what is expected by those that use deviations from the
> English standard, then those deviators are really intolerant, if they want
> standard English to adopt also their deviation:
These spellings are generally associated with having money! There's a
dictum that people with money spell their names as they want to, as in the
aristocratic 'Beauchamp' compared to the more lowly 'Beecham', or
'Cholmondeley' compared to 'Chumley'. The Duke of Wellington's family
started out as plain 'Wesley', becoming 'Wellesley' as their fortunes rose.
I give you a quotation from P.G. Wodehouse:
"Sir Jasper Finch-Farrowmere?" said Wilfred.
"ffinch-ffarrowmere," corrected the visitor, his sensitive ear
detecting the capitals.
>they are speaking another language; so don't blame Unicode if this does not
>work with this non-English language...
> I'm really not sure that those slang words are so common. I ignored their
> existence in some vernacular variants of English.
They are not slang - see for example,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_ffrench ,
The automatic capitalisation of proper names for title case is near the
boundary of what one hope to do with simple data tables. 'McGowan is very
difficult; 'Mackenzie' is impossible, for there are those who write their
name 'MacKenzie'. Dutch 'IJsselmeer' is a much better example of what can
be done. Other languages have difficulties with this placename - I can find
both of 'IJsselmeer' and 'Ijsselmeer' in English, French and German.
Richard.
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