On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 9:03 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solip...@pitrou.net> wrote: > Le jeudi 01 septembre 2011 à 08:45 -0700, Guido van Rossum a écrit : >> This is definitely thought of as a separate >> mark added to the e; ë is not a new letter. I have a feeling it's the >> same way for the French and Germans, but I really don't know. >> (Antoine? Georg?) > > Indeed, they are not separate "letters" (they are considered the same in > lexicographic order, and the French alphabet has 26 letters). > > But I'm not sure how it's relevant, because you can't remove an accent > without most likely making a spelling error, or at least changing the > meaning. Accents are very much part of the language (while ligatures > like "ff" are not, they are a rendering detail). So I would consider > "é", "ê", "ù", etc. atomic characters for the purpose of processing > French text. And I don't see how a decomposed form could help an > application.
The example given was someone who didn't agree with how a particular font rendered those accented characters. I agree that's obscure though. I recall long ago that when the french wrote words in all caps they would drop the accents, e.g. ECOLE. I even recall (through the mists of time) observing this in Paris on public signs. Is this still the convention? Maybe it only was a compromise in the time of Morse code? -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com