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From: dant@tekla.TEK.COM (Dan Tilque;1893;92-789;LP=A;60HC)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,sci.lang
Subject: Re: English digraphs, diacritiacl marks
Message-ID: <2275@zeus.TEK.COM>
Date: Sun, 23-Aug-87 09:29:31 EDT
Article-I.D.: zeus.2275
Posted: Sun Aug 23 09:29:31 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 24-Aug-87 00:05:36 EDT
References: <8708171253.AA21033@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu>
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Reply-To: dant@tekla.UUCP (Dan Tilque)
Organization: First National Security Trust Bar and Grill
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Xref: mnetor comp.std.internat:158 sci.lang:1201

Jerry Schwarz writes:
>
>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.

The ANSI X3J11 committee should stick to things they are expert in,
like C.  Hawaiian has 14 sounds in it including the glottal stop.
Glottal stops are usually written with an apostrophe.  Admittedly,
the apostrophe is in the ASCII character set, but it's not one
of the 26 Latin derived letters.

I would expect most, if not all, the other Polynesian languages to
be similar to Hawaiian (in having a glottal and having such a
limited set of sounds as to be representable by at most 26 letters
plus the apostrophe.)


---
Dan Tilque
dant@tekla.tek.com  or dant@tekla.UUCP