[Python-Dev] PEP 393 Summer of Code Project

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Guido van Rossum writes:
 > On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 12:13 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

 > > while at least this Spanish-as-a-second-language learner was taught
 > > that `ñ' is an atomic character represented by a discontiguous glyph,
 > > like `i', and it is no more related to `n' than `m' is.  Users really
 > > believe that characters are atomic.  Even in the cases of Han
 > > characters and Hangul, users think of the characters as being
 > > "atomic," but in the sense of Bohr rather than that of Democritus.
 > 
 > Ah, I think this may very well be culture-dependent.

I'm not an expert, but I'm fairly sure it is.  Specifically, I heard
from a TeX-ie friend that the same accented letter is typeset (and
collated) differently in different European languages because in some
of them the accent is considered part of the letter (making a
different character), while in others accents modify a single
underlying character.  The ones that consider the letter and accent to
constitute a single character also prefer to leave less space, he
said.

 > But in a word like "coëxistentie" (coexistence) the o and e do not
 > form the oe-sound, and to emphasize this to Dutch readers (who
 > believe their spelling is very logical :-), the official spelling
 > puts the umlaut on the e.

American English has the same usage, but it's optional (in particular,
you'll see naive, naif, and words like coordinate typeset that way
occasionally, for the same reason I suppose).

As Hagen Fürstenau points out, with multiple combining characters,
there are even more complex possibilities than "the accent is part of
the character" and "it's really not", and they may be application-
dependent.

 > Finally, my guess is that the Spanish emphasis on ñ as a separate
 > letter has to do with teaching how it has a separate position in the
 > localized collation sequence, doesn't it?

You'd have to ask Mr. Gonzalez.  I suspect he may have taught that way
less because of his Castellano upbringing, and more because of the
infamous lack of sympathy of American high school students for the
fine points of usage in foreign languages.

 > I'm also curious if ñ occurs as a separate character on Spanish
 > keyboards.

If I'm reading /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/es correctly, it does in
X.org:  the key that for English users would map to ASCII tilde.