Warning: off-topic post. Read at your own risk.
cga2000 wrote:
On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 03:36:54AM EDT, Matthew Winn wrote:
On Sun, Jul 23, 2006 at 06:41:09PM -0400, cga2000 wrote:
Avoid words such as "coeur".. "boeuf".. etc. Rather amazing that the
French who are so picky about anything that concerns their language
never came up with a codepage.. or whatever it's called that features
this particular character.
I think it dates from the days when typewriters were popular. The US
dominance of the market for office equipment prompted many European
languages to manage without combinations like oe, ae and ij where the
characters can be approximated by typing separate letters. It's easier
to change typing habits than to manufacture a new range of typewriters
just to deal with one special letter.
.. hmm.. as far as I know only France and Germany went to the trouble of
designing their own typewriter keyboard layouts separate from the QWERTY
model. I think Polish keyboards are derived from the German layout.. I
would assume variations of the French layout are used in other
French-speaking countries and some African countries.. As to other
European countries - ie. the ones that speak neither French nor German -
I believe that you are correct and that they use derivatives of the US
keyboard.
Therefore, since the French went so far as building keyboards that have
the basic letters arranged differently (AZERTY instead of QWERTY) it
would not have been such a major enhancement to provide an "oe" some
place on that keyboard..?
I have a feeling it is more a question of whoever designed the original
French typewriter keyboard just did not think it worth bothering with
such typographic niceties as providing an "o dans l'e" (or is it the
other way round?) when the end result with fixed-width characters was
going to be light-years removed from the refinements of traditional
typesetting anyway..
But I would agree that the absence of the "oe" on French keyboards
(typewriters and computers alike) probably accounts for the fact that
you can't find it anywhere in the latin* charsets.
Prior to computers many keyboards didn't even have separate keys for
the digits 1 and 0, typists using the letters l and O instead.
I was aware of the l/1 thing.. sometimes use it when I feel lazy.
Thanks
cga
Before computers, I used a "French" typewriter keyboard (AZERTY type).
Nowadays I use a "Belgian" computer keyboard (also AZERTY but with
special characters arranged differently). My father has an old
typewriter he bought in Switzerland when he was a student, and it uses a
QWERTZ layout. (Switzerland has four official languages, viz. German,
French, Italian and Romanche; and I don't know how many different
keyboards they use.)
On a mechanical typewriter, it was possible to use "half-spacing" by
holding the space bar down. So, if one wanted to produce the oe digraph
on a French typewriter (not an electric one though), it was possible --
for a perfectionist. Let's say I wanted to type "boeuf" (= beef/ox):
1. press and hold spacebar. This advances the carriage by one half space
2. hit b. This prints b without moving the carriage.
3. release, press and hold spacebar.
4. hit o
5. release spacebar. The carriage is now over the right half of the o.
6. hit e u f in succession.
The oe digraph is called "o, e dans l'o" and the ae digraph is called in
French "a, e dans l'a". The latter as in Serge Gainsbourg's song
"elaeudanla téitéia" (which spells the name "Laetitia").
French typewriters indeed seldom had the digits one and zero: small-ell
and big-oh were used insted. But it even carried over to computers:
Several decades ago (before the merger with Honeywell), the (French)
Bull computer company used on its computers a charset where the same
character could mean either zero or O-for-Oscar depending on context --
and another one, I think, could mean one or I-for-India. (Few computers
had lowercase in those days.) This, of course, caused headaches without
end when trying to convert those computers' magnetic tapes to IBM's BCD
and EBCDIC standards or to (whose? PDP? CDC? other?) ASCII.
I'm not sure non-English non-French non-German speaking countries all
use a US-derived keyboard, even if we limit ourselves to those that use
variants of the Latin alphabet. Typewriters, after all, date back to (I
think) before World War I, a time when English was much less dominant
internationally than it is now. At the courts of St-Petersburg and
Potsdam, French was spoken; Germany and Austria together covered (or had
recently covered) a territory that went from Alsace to Silesia and from
Schleswig-Holstein to the plain of the Po. I suspect that most of
Central Europe would have adopted a German-derived (or maybe
French-derived) keyboard regardless of whether the majority language was
Czech, Slovak, Italian, Hungarian, Croatian...
I agree that the lack of oe OE digraphs in the Latin charsets is
probably due to their absence on French typewriter keyboards. (AE ae
were kept because they are used in Danish.) There is more than a
single-letter difference with English though: not only the layout is
different but there are several accented letters. The French (and
Belgian) keyboards have a dead key for circumflex and
trema/diaeresis/umlaut, but à ç é è ù and sometimes uppercase-C-cedilla
each have their own glyphs. (In French, uppercase letters with the
exception of C-cedilla and sometimes E-acute were usually left
unaccented. I believe computers are slowly pushing back the trend.)
Best regards,
Tony.
