Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!rutgers!ucla-cs!zen!ucbvax!ulysses!hector!jss From: jss@hector..UUCP (Jerry Schwarz) Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,sci.lang Subject: Re: English digraphs, diacritiacl marks Message-ID: <2842@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> Date: Fri, 21-Aug-87 16:45:08 EDT Article-I.D.: ulysses.2842 Posted: Fri Aug 21 16:45:08 1987 Date-Received: Sun, 23-Aug-87 03:32:57 EDT References: <8708171253.AA21033@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu> <2237@zeus.TEK.COM> Sender: daemon@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com Reply-To: jss@hector (Jerry Schwarz) Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Murray Hill Lines: 17 Xref: mnetor comp.std.internat:140 sci.lang:1186 Jean-Francois Lamy writes: > >Just by curiosity, a quick scan of my brain seems to indicate that English >would be the only European language not to use diacritical marks, digraphs, >or extra letters. (? - I mean something like the dutch "ij"). I quote from a draft of the Rationale of the proposed ANSI C standard, section 4.4: The English language uses 26 letters derived from the Latin alphabet. The set of letters suffices for English, Swahili, and Hawaiian; all other living languages use either the Latin aphabet plus other characters, or other non Latin aphabets or syllabaries. They cite no reference for this piece of trivia.