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From: storm@diku.UUCP (Kim Fabricius Storm)
Newsgroups: net.nlang,net.text
Subject: Re: about diacritical marks (danish dynamite)
Message-ID: <1087@diku.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 30-Jul-85 23:16:18 EDT
Article-I.D.: diku.1087
Posted: Tue Jul 30 23:16:18 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 1-Aug-85 06:12:47 EDT
References: <1065@diku.UUCP> <763@mcvax.UUCP> <1070@diku.UUCP> <775@mcvax.UUCP>
Organization: DIKU, U of Copenhagen, DK
Lines: 56
Xref: linus net.nlang:3141 net.text:464

In article <775@mcvax.UUCP> aeb@mcvax.UUCP (Andries Brouwer) writes:
>Last time I just mentioned a few accents that occurred to me while
>writing - let me now give a more detailed overview of what accents
>exist.

>- Corona (circle above) (o) is found in Scandinavian oa and Czech ou .
                                                      ^^
>Various ligatures are conventionally treated as a single symbol.
>One has Dutch ij , German ss (or sz), French oe and
>Scandinavian (and Latin) ae .
                          ^^
>Some symbols with a crossbar are
>Polish /l and /L ; Scandinavian /o and /O ; ...
                                 ^^
As a Dane, I would like to point out some misunderstandings in your article.
If not a misunderstanding, then somebody is completely ignorant of facts!

According to my knowledge ae /o and oa (marked with ^^ in the extract) are NOT
an 'a-e ligature', an 'o with a crossbar' or an 'a with a circle above' - they
are genuine letters in the danish alphabet:
   A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V (W) X Y Z AE /O oA
(please observe the ordering of the letters.)
I don't think you can show me any danish dictionary, in which AE /O and oA don't
have their own sections far away from those of A E and O!
  I have seen a few american books with a Danish summary at the end, e.g.
Brinch-Hansen: The Architecture of Concurrent Programs, where it is obvious
that the publisher has treated AE /O and oA as special cases of A E and O, as
in your list; the result is terrible, and if that is what we can expect from
future versions of troff then ... UURGH! It might be ok for a short summary
in Danish... But not a whole book, please! 
  Please don't correct me about troff - I know that one can map the proper
letters into the fonts, if they are available in the printer, but I would
not like to see a version of troff in Denmark claiming to have a Danish
alphabet, if it is made with a-e ligatures, / on O's and a scaled down
'o' on top of A's!

  BTW: As indicated above W is not always considered a genuine letter in Danish.
in danish W only occurs in a few personal names and in foreign words, and in
most dictionaries it is treated just as if it was a V.

>I would be thankful if people mailed me their additions and corrections.

If you still persist in calling AE a ligature, then I would suggest that
you included w (or vv) as a ligature too; according to  your rules, any letter
that COULD be composed by other 'normal' (english?) letters, should be
considered a ligature. Any objections from the people conserned should of
course be ignored!
   Treating W as a ligature also has the great advantage, that the
character becomes available for general purpose use, e.g. as delimiter or
escape character. This is consistent with the use of {|} and [\], which
unfortunately are used for the Danish letters ae /o oa AE /O and oA -
C-programs are great fun :-( to edit on my terminal, you wouldn't believe it
was C if you saw it!

----
Kim F. Storm, DIKU, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.