On 2016/03/31 06:42, Philippe Verdy wrote:
The use of "ÿ" in Dutch should also be considered as an orthographic fault,
and it should be corrected into "ij" (to solve the capitalization problem),
but there are occurences in Dutch of "ÿ" which is correct (notably in
borrowed French toponyms such as "L’Haÿ-les-Roses")
There may be similar examples in Belgium with French toponyms, but I
suspect that those Belgian-French toponyms have their own Dutch
"officialized" variant which would be preferable without borrowing the
Belgian-French orthography,
I'm not too familiar with the local Belgian customs for place names, but
in general, correspondences will not be that simple. There may be cases
with exactly the same spelling (but different pronunciation), cases with
simple spelling differences, cases with different words (same or
different meanings), and so on.
so that they will not need "ÿ", and they will
likely use "ij" instead, meaning that the autocorrection of "ÿ" from
possible Belgian-French toponyms into "ij" will also be correct for
Dutch-Belgian toponyms ; it may also be correct for French-French toponyms
like "L’Haÿ-les-Roses" transformed into "L’Haij-les-Roses" in Belgian-Dutch,
or "L’HAIJ-LES-ROSES" if capitalized, if autocorrected this way; it would
however be incorrect to replace there the "ij" (or IJ) letter by the two
letters "ij" (or "IJ") without the orthographic ligature...
I'm not an expert in French or Dutch pronunciation or orthography, but
as far as I understand, transforming "L’Haÿ-les-Roses" to
"L’Haij-les-Roses" would be wrong because it would lead to a wrong
pronunciation; if anything, "L’Hij-les-Roses" would be closer.
By curiosity, I looked into the Dutch Wikipedia to see how they wrote
"L’Haÿ-les-Roses"
and they don't transform the French "ÿ" into some Dutch "ij" (and they don't
have any other "officialized" Dutch orthography.
With Unicode, there's less and less of a need to "officialize" such
spellings, even though of course whether to do so or not will continue
to depend on other factors such as culture and official policy.
For this reason, the autocorrection of the "ÿ" letter into the "ij" letter
in Dutch is disabled by default (even if it would be needed to look into
old documents encoded with ISO8859-1).
The situation is more complex for the autocorrection of the "ij" digram
(extremely frequent in old documents encoded with ISO8859-1) into the plain
"ij" letter, which seems to be active in various wordprocessors (but which
causes problems with borrowed non-Dutch names).
Such problems these days can be solved by using context-sensitive
corrections, either with something close to regular expressions
(detecting typical Dutch spellings) or dictionaries.
Regards, Martin.
