🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <TMB.91May20125338@volterra.ai.mit.edu> tmb@ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel) writes:

> Historically, it may have been nice to provide these ligatures to
> improve the appearance of printed text.  However, German can be
> written perfectly well with only the standard 26 letter "English"
> alphabet, and in this day and age of standardization, it would
> probably be a good idea to make use of the umlaut and the 'sz'
> ligature optional and eventually eliminate them altogether.

What is the point of compacting the German alphabet, at the cost of
hideous combinations of letters to represent a single vowel or dipthong
(or do you like "laeuft"?), when virtually every other European* language
uses diacrital marks of some sort or another?  Do you also want to
force the Spanish, French, Dutch, and Danish (who already have too many
vowels for their alphabet) to use the "standard 26 letter alphabet"?

There aren't that many diacrital marks and unique letters in the
Western European languages, and many computer programs I use are able
to use them.  The only problem is that, in the absence of an
international 8-bit standard, the programs can't trade umlauts and
tildes with one another.  The solution is to come up with a standard,
rather than to ban the marks and make the world blander.

[*Apologies to Greeks, Russians, and any other Europeans using non-Roman
alphabets]
-- 
Greg Holley     sun!sono!holley     holley@sono.uucp

"My tale is so strange that, were it written with needles on the interior
corner of an eye, yet would it prove a lesson to the circumspect."