Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!wuarchive!uunet!voa3!ck From: ck@voa3.VOA.GOV (Chris Kern) Newsgroups: comp.std.internat Subject: Re: Unicode vs ISO DIS 10646 (was universality of Latin-1) Message-ID: <1991May4.180549.29162@voa3.VOA.GOV> Date: 4 May 91 18:05:49 GMT References: <10003@plains.NoDak.edu> Organization: Voice of America, Washington, D.C. Lines: 28 In article enag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) writes: >Consider the Norwegian and French words for a small restaurant, >spelled "cafe'" (where the ' serves as a floating acute accent for >rendering purposes in the absence of an international character set >standard in which we wouldn't need it :-). In Norwegian, the acute >accent over e is optional, it's an ornament to indicate stress, >toneme, etc. It's not orthographically required. In French, an e >with acute is a different orthographic unit than plain, unadorned e. > >This means that in Norwegian, we can make do with a floating acute >accent, since the function of the acute accent is to modify the >character with which is combined. In French, however, they cannot >make do with a floating acute accent because the acute accent does not >have a function by itself. Rather, the unit is "e with acute". I confess that I don't understand the problem. Regardless of the attributes of the underlying language, is there some reason why I should care whether a character-diacritic combination is stored as one code or two as long as (a) its image is properly rendered when I need to look at it and (b) a program which consumes a text stream that includes such (character-diacritic) combinations can unambiguously determine its content? (Of course, if I can meet requirement "b" presumably I can meet requirement "a" as well.) -- Chris Kern ck@voa3.voa.gov ...uunet!voa3!ck +1 202-619-2020