From: Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven (asmodai@in-nomine.org)
Date: Tue Dec 15 2009 - 04:21:57 CST
[As an aside, your email formatting is seriously messed up. Can you please
stop hitting enter at some arbitrary point in your sentences and just type
on and let word-wrap solve it all?]
-On [20091215 03:41], verdy_p (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr) wrote:
>On the opposite, I'm not sure that "ij" and "IJ" are completely unbreakable
>(even modern Dutch today consider them to be breakable and representable as
>letter pairs (with the ZWJ ligature hint), given that it has become
>widespread to write Dutch words without them.
Actually ij is unbreakable from a language point of view. You cannot
hyphenate any words using it like blijdschap into bli-jdschap. I think the
Dutch problem of using ij/IJ/y/Y for the ij comes from the fact we have been
using US English keyboards for a long time now. These sport no key for ij and
software was not smart enough back in the day to provide a proper ij when
people typed ij. At school when we learn writing we *do* learn to write ij as
an unbreakable character. As such I am also not sure how semantically
correct it would be to write it as i + ZWJ + j.
Looking then back to the history of ij you would get ii, but I am not sure if
that would be one character or two melded together via a ZWJ. I would need
to look at some old documents for that.
Funny aside: in school we actually learn to write it as a ligature, with a
solid connection from i to j, whereas print seems to have it as a digraph
with no connection.
-- Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai(-at-)in-nomine.org> / asmodai イェルーン ラウフロック ヴァン デル ウェルヴェン http://www.in-nomine.org/ | http://www.rangaku.org/ | GPG: 2EAC625B Paradoxes, side by side...
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