joe at strout dot net kirjoitti:
> Yes, but if I were in charge, you wouldn't be able to make an accented
> character this way -- a letter followed by an accent would display as
> two characters, a letter followed by an accent. That way, everyone
> would be agreed that an accented letter is a *different* letter than
> the base letter by itself, and we wouldn't have two visually identical
> ways of representing the same text.
>
The major reason for the dubble form of accented characters
(composed-decomposed) is alphabetical sort. In some languages that use
accented characters A and Ä are sorted as equal characters (e.g. in
German) while in other they are not (e.g. in Finnish and Swedish). (Also
what is an alphabetical order varies from language to language and
within language (IIRC there are – or at least used to be – four
alphabetical orders for German in Germany depending on context)).
And then there is the problem of sorting words with accented characters
in languages where they are not part of (e.g. in English). I don't know
how is this solved in daily usage, but at least United Nations uses same
system as German, i.e. A and Ä are sorted equally in English.
Metsis
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