From: André Szabolcs Szelp (a.sz.szelp@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Sep 24 2008 - 04:26:44 CDT
Jeroen,
> Well, last I checked the schools still teach to write ij as ij and not as two
> separate letters.
> Could be that 'they' (whoever they may be) state that to accommodate the
> multitude of US English keyboards present in the Netherlands you have to use
> i and j and that ij is a compatibility character. I have no clue about that.
>
> That would mean what is used and what is taught are quite distinct.
Also all the digraphs (and the one trigraph) cs, dz, dzs, gy, ly ny,
sz, ty, zs) are taught to be own, distinct letters in Hungarian (in
school. And they are considered such by the official orthography of
the Hungarian Academy of Sciences as well). Nevertheless, they are
represented as two characters in electronic (and otherwise) text. This
is not a contradiction.
letter != character
A digraph is exactly this: one grapheme (which might or might not be
considered a letter by a given orthography: consider Dutch ij and
Hungarian sz, cs,... Slovak ch [considered an own letter] vs. English
ch, sh,... and German ch, sch,... [not considered a letter]) which is
represented by more than one character.
I know about the casing tradtion of IJ ( IJssel, e.g., as you put it),
though as I am said this is only Netherlands-Dutch, but not
Belgian-Dutch typographic/orthographic tradition.
You can write IJssel with I+J (as separate characters) without a problem :)
Anyway, I wanted to thank Karl for clarifying issues. This is
perfectly reasonable. I just was not aware about the range of
applications and validity of the proposed keyboard standard.
Szabolcs
-- Szelp, André Szabolcs +43 (650) 79 22 400
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