🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <723@castor.linkoping.telesoft.se> ath@linkoping.telesoft.se (Anders Thulin) writes:
>I should have used the word 'indispensable' instead. I doubt it is so
>in English - all dictionaries I have consulted use the separate forms
>as headwords - the ligatures are occasionally listed as alternative
>spellings. 

The problem is that even when writing in English, you frequently need
oe and ae ligatures, and even some accented letters.  When?  Precisely
whey you are talking about the English language itself.  This
discussion, for example, couldn't be typeset by a system that used
Latin1.  

If Latin1 is proposed as a standard for (for instance) encoding the
textual material of published books, it's going to have to cope with
people (for example historians, or linguists, or lit. critters) who
need to be able to quote texts from more than 30 years ago.  

And as M\'\i che\'al \'O Searc\'oid pointed out at TeX90, Latin1
doesn't cover Irish, which has some accented constonants.

Oh, and my Chambers 20th Century dictionary lists the following words
beginning \ae\ or \oe\ which don't have ae and oe variants:

   \ae sc              (the O.E. letter `ash' now written \ae!)
   \oe il-de-b\oe uf   (a little round window)
   \oe illade          (an ogle)
   
None of these are marked as foreign or obsolete.  Of course this was
eight years ago, things may be different now...

>My problem was with French - a language I don't know. Is the <oe>
>ligature really indispensable - I can't help thinking it would have
>made its way into the Latin-1/... code tables if it was. Is
>`chef-d'<oe>uvre' the only way to spell that word?

Hmm, an interesting idea---`if it was useful it would be in the
standard'.  Ahh, if only ISO worked that way...

Cheers,

Alan.
-- 
Alan Jeffrey         Tel: +46 31 72 10 98         jeffrey@cs.chalmers.se
Department of Computer Sciences, Chalmers University, Gothenburg, Sweden