Xref: utzoo comp.fonts:2542 soc.culture.german:4365 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!mintaka!ai-lab!life!tmb From: tmb@ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel) Newsgroups: comp.fonts,soc.culture.german Subject: Re: Umlaute [was: naive (...question about uncial...) ] Message-ID: Date: 22 May 91 14:27:57 GMT References: <1991Apr24.152455.22367@engage.enet.dec.com> Sender: news@ai.mit.edu Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab Lines: 39 In-reply-to: holley@sono.uucp's message of 22 May 91 01:39:31 GMT In article holley@sono.uucp (Greg Holley) writes: In article tmb@ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel) writes: > and in this day and age of standardization, it would probably be > a good idea to make use of the umlaut and the 'sz' ligature > optional and eventually eliminate them altogether. What is the point of compacting the German alphabet, at the cost of hideous combinations of letters to represent a single vowel or dipthong (or do you like "laeuft"?), when virtually every other European* language uses diacrital marks of some sort or another? I don't think the combinations are any more hideous that what German and most other languages already have: "sch", "ch", "au", etc. It's merely a question of what you are used to. There aren't that many diacrital marks and unique letters in the Western European languages, and many computer programs I use are able to use them. The problem is not that computer programs are incompatible with it; _I_ am incompatible with it. It is a pain having to get used to different keyboards for different languages, having to deal with different string ordering conventions, etc. Furthermore, these diacritical marks eat up precious keyboard real estate; brackets and braces are in much harder to reach places on, say, a German keyboard (if they are there at all) than on an American keyboard. Do you also want to force the Spanish, French, Dutch, and Danish (who already have too many vowels for their alphabet) to use the "standard 26 letter alphabet"? No country can be "forced" to give up their orthograpy. In any case, I believe most dialects of English already have more vowels than any of the languages you mention (certainly more than Spanish). English has somewhere around 14 vowels. Thomas.