🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <HOLLEY.91May21183931@fog.sono.uucp> holley@sono.uucp (Greg Holley) writes:
   In article <TMB.91May20125338@volterra.ai.mit.edu> tmb@ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel) writes:

   > 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?

I don't think the combinations are any more hideous that what German
and most other languages already have: "sch", "ch", "au", etc. It's
merely a question of what you are used to.

   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 problem is not that computer programs are incompatible with it;
_I_ am incompatible with it. It is a pain having to get used to
different keyboards for different languages, having to deal with
different string ordering conventions, etc. Furthermore, these
diacritical marks eat up precious keyboard real estate; brackets
and braces are in much harder to reach places on, say, a German
keyboard (if they are there at all) than on an American keyboard.

   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"?

No country can be "forced" to give up their orthograpy.

In any case, I believe most dialects of English already have more
vowels than any of the languages you mention (certainly more than
Spanish). English has somewhere around 14 vowels.

					Thomas.