Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!lll-winken!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!emory!gatech!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!chalmers.se!cs.chalmers.se!jeffrey
From: jeffrey@cs.chalmers.se (Alan Jeffrey)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Polyglot List Issue (Really: Does Latin-1 cover Western Europe ?)
Keywords: \oe, Latin-1, ISO 8859-1
Message-ID: <4365@undis.cs.chalmers.se>
Date: 4 Feb 91 22:01:55 GMT
References: <1991Jan29.200653.23928@sq.sq.com> <723@castor.linkoping.telesoft.se> <4363@undis.cs.chalmers.se> <727@castor.linkoping.telesoft.se>
Organization: Dept. of CS, Chalmers, Sweden
Lines: 34

In article <727@castor.linkoping.telesoft.se>:
>True, but of minor relevance. 8859/1 was (as far as I understand it)
>intended for interchange of modern langauges - obsolete and
>obsolescent forms were not included. Is *that* why French <oe> isn't
>there? (And is that why the y with dieresis is there?)

The question is---is Latin1 intended for modern languages, or modern
documents?  Documents written today still need to be able to refer to
obsolete usages.  The problem is where you draw the line to say `this
character is strange enough that its usage is completely dead', and
I'm not convinced that \oe\ is that old.  I even saw it on a road
sign in the UK a few months ago.

[About various words beginning `\oe' in Chambers.]

>I'm almost sure you're joking now... 

Well, yes, it wasn't meant particularly seriously, but it does mean
that eight years ago there were still words in English that Chambers
reckoned couldn't be written without \oe.  \OE illade is a bit of a
weirdo, but \oe il-de-b\oe f is a common enough architectural term
that I've heard of it.  And like I said, neither of these are marked
foreign or obsolete.

Oh, as an aside, if I type` \oe' as `oe' in my plain text, how will I
cope with the fact that it should be capitalised as `OEillade' if the
oe is a ligature, and `Oeillade' otherwise? 

Cheers,

Alan.
-- 
Alan Jeffrey         Tel: +46 31 72 10 98         jeffrey@cs.chalmers.se
Department of Computer Sciences, Chalmers University, Gothenburg, Sweden