From: David Oftedal (david@start.no)
Date: Fri Mar 07 2003 - 11:27:08 EST
What an interesting character ij, or y is. It really shows how languages
evolve over time. As for the æ:
>>How do you know that? Either "Caesar" or "Cæsar" is good Latin.
>>
>>
We're not necessarily talking about Latin here. In Norwegian and Danish,
æ is not a ligature, but a separate sound almost unpronounceable by
English speakers. Imagine the first A in "Adamant" or "Ass" spoken with
a very broad Texan accent. It has very little logical connection with
either a or e. This also goes for å (a+a) and ø, of course. However,
without understanding how this character is used in Scandinavian
languages, this could easily be misunderstood.
>However, breaking up the *character* æ into separate glyphs for a and e goes
>against the reason why this character is at all encoded, and the
>*character* æ must always be rendered ligated.
>
I totally agree. This goes for other ligatures as well. For instance,
"@" is seldom broken into a+d, "&" is seldom broken into e+t, and "?" is
very seldom broken into ~, although they COULD be, strictly speaking.
-Dave Oftedal (davidadstart.no)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Mar 07 2003 - 12:09:45 EST