Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!wuarchive!uunet!mcsun!corton!inria!seti!minos!deschamp From: Philippe.Deschamp@Seti.INRIA.Fr (Philippe Deschamp) Newsgroups: comp.std.internat Subject: Re: Latin-1 and the French language Keywords: ISO 8859-1, Latin-1, french, ligature Message-ID: <1941@seti.inria.fr> Date: 15 Feb 91 12:02:04 GMT References: <728@castor.linkoping.telesoft.se> Sender: news@seti.inria.fr Reply-To: Philippe.Deschamp@Seti.INRIA.Fr Organization: Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA) Lines: 47 >>>>> AT == ath@linkoping.telesoft.se (Anders Thulin) >>>>> EN == enag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) >>>>> GP == egr@contact.uucp (Gordan Palameta) AT> It was recently remarked in comp.text that ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) does not AT> cover the major Western languages. As an example, it was noted that the AT> French letter (ligature of o and e) was not included in any of the AT> Latin-n tables. AT> I am trying to find out the reason for this apparent oversight. GP> OE and oe were dropped from the original Latin-1 proposal (at the request GP> of the French representative, no less, on the grounds that this is a GP> ligature and not a separate letter). Never believe what experts say :-). This is a sad story! AT> Is an indispensable character in French? Yes (I should add, IMHO, but somehow cannot :-). Some words will use "oe" (two separate letters), some others (the [in]famous so-called ligature). Examples: oeil (eye), oeuf (egg), boeuf (ox), oeuvre (work, opus), coeur (heart) all use the ligature , and must be written il, uf, buf, uvre, cur, while coefficient, coercition, coexister (self-explanatory) or boette (a kind of bait) do not use it. Thus this ``ligature'' is different from the "ff", "fi", "ffi" ligatures, which are imposed by typographers as soon as the characters occur together: I write "coefficient", and I want it to appear on paper as "coecient". EN> Sigh! If the French attempt to boycott ISO 8859-1 as the one-octet default EN> for ISO 10646, and want their own ISO 8859-n (for some large n) why can't EN> we just "update" ISO 8859-1 by re-inserting those OE and oe ligatures right EN> in the middle of the other "O with random squiggle" series? I would second this kind of proposition, but I am afraid it is too late. EN> I'm not impressed by this counter-productivity and random politicking. I do not want to comment on that. The only thing I have to say is that I would like to be able to use ISO 8859 to write texts in the french language, and at the moment this is not possible with only ISO 8859-1. -- Philippe Deschamp. Tlx: 697033F Fax: +33 (1) 39-63-53-30 Tel: +33 (1) 39-63-58-58 Email: Philippe.Deschamp@Nuri.INRIA.Fr || ...!inria!deschamp Smail: INRIA, Rocquencourt, BP 105, 78153 Le Chesnay Cedex, France