Typophile - Titlecase digraphs - Comments

And do you know of more

Michel Boyer — Tue, 8 Apr 2008 08:34:02 -0700

And do you know of more reliable plain text dictionaries?

The OpenOffice dictionaries are plain text and those for French I have looked at don’t suffer from the “Œ” bug. It seems clear that “œrsted” is now “oersted” after the reform on which I could find some information here (in French).

Michel

Yes, I normally write æ

Oisín — Tue, 8 Apr 2008 05:39:21 -0700

Yes, I normally write æ like that by hand (though the writing style I currently use the most has double-storey a’s, as well). However, it is far less common than the ‘ce’ style, at least in Denmark.

Another style is to actually write œ, which some people also do (I myself used to write æ’s like that previously).

I have seen handwriting

aszszelp — Tue, 8 Apr 2008 01:35:20 -0700

I have seen handwriting styles where (naturally) a single a is single-storey, but for æ a double-storey-A–E ligature is used.(starting like the bowl of the P, curling back at the bottom to form the A’s bowl and writing an e, looking like antiqua print æ-s, connecting from left at the x-height, on the right at the baseline.

the latter just seems an

Michel Boyer — Mon, 7 Apr 2008 18:29:04 -0700

the latter just seems an odd, misplaced Frenchification more likely to cause confusion than anything.

The more I look the more I am puzzled.

I downloaded the two Mozilla French dictionaries from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/browse/type:3. The files have extension .xpi and you just unzip them to get the dictionaries, that are good old-style plain text ISO8859-15 (latin9) encoded files (one word per line); fr-FR.dic (82000 entries) would be the “pre 1990” version and fr.dic (1990 reform, 90 000 entries) would to be the most “modern” one. Instead of utf-8 re-encoding, I just used a unix window (on my mac) with “Window Settings > Display, Character Set Encoding > Western (ISO Latin 9)” and kept the files as is to better see the bugs.

I first looked at all proper names containing “oe” or “œ” in fr-FR.dic. Here is the command (I had to make a screen grab)

and I got on the output the following list (one entry per line):

Coelho, Defoe, Goethe, Groenland, Hoegaerden, Hoeilaart, Koekelberg, Loewner, Noether, Oedipe/LM, OEM, Oersted/M, Piedbœuf, Schoenberg, Toeplitz, Westhoek.

This proves that in foreign names, even if “oe” is not pronounced as two separate letters, French will use “oe” if necessary, and not “œ”. The entry “Oedipe” looks however erroneous and the fact that Oersted is not written “Œrsted” may unfortunately be explained by... a bug.

Indeed, if I look more carefully at the file fr-FR.dic (if I search for “rsted”), I realize that the character “Œ” was ill encoded; it was encoded twice 0xBE (for “Œrsted” and “Œdipe”) and twice 0x8C (for “d’Œrsted” and “d’Œdipe”), instead of 0xBC. The entries “Oedipe” and “Oersted” might just be... a patch?

If I compare fr-FR.dic with fr.dic, I see that the entry “œrsted” (for the physical unit) has become “oersted”, which seems to be reasonable but, on the other hand, many other “œ” are now “oe” in fr.dic, for unknown reasons. Those I have checked have not changed in the “Petit Robert” dictionary (online). Does anyone know who decided what in 1990? And do you know of more reliable plain text dictionaries?

Michel

That sounds very odd to

Oisín — Mon, 7 Apr 2008 17:39:32 -0700

That sounds very odd to me.

In handwriting, yes, æ is usually written very similar to œ (or rather, almost exactly like ce in joined-up writing). But I’ve never seen anyone confuse æ with œ in type. A classmate of mine who bought her computer in the US could never figure out how to type æ on her US keyboard layout, so she consistently used œ instead, but even though it was legible, everybody noticed that it looked wrong, and it slowed down reading.

That a newspaper could actually mix them up sounds completely bizarre and absurd to me.

In Norwegian handwriting, æ

frode frank — Mon, 7 Apr 2008 07:33:44 -0700

In Norwegian handwriting, æ is very similar to œ. I think most Norwegians don’t even know œ excist. Actually, last saturday Dagbladet accidentally switched æ for œ in a headline.

Szabolcs, thanks! Nick, I

Eben Sorkin — Sun, 6 Apr 2008 17:28:36 -0700

Szabolcs, thanks!

Nick, I can see where you might be inspired. It is really well done isn’t it?

Oh, that example (Tiptoe)

aszszelp — Sun, 6 Apr 2008 11:28:36 -0700

Oh, that example (Tiptoe) uses Ae-lig, Oe-lig and Ue-lig for Ä, Ö, and Ü, not actually for œ or Œ.

In German typo-/ortho-graphy (alone) it’s acceptable to replace umlaut with a following e; a typographic alternative is to merge those letters (see also: e.g. http://www.liechtensteinmuseum.at/de/pages/home.asp ’s typeface NEUE ÖFFNUNGSZEITEN SEIT 2. MÄRZ 2008 (with Ö and Ä as OE-lig, AE-lig )
It is not acceptable to use a postscript e for umlaut-dots in most other languages (compare: it’s only acceptable to use apostrophe instead of caron for d, l and t in Slovak and Czech, not in any other language).

Still, I understand that Tiptoe was just your _source_ of inspiration. French indeed cries for Titlecase version for that letter :-)

Eben, I was asking about the

Nick Shinn — Sun, 6 Apr 2008 11:01:10 -0700

Eben, I was asking about the phenomenon in general.
I collected the idea from Karsten’s Tiptoe.

Hm, good point, Nick! The

aszszelp — Sun, 6 Apr 2008 10:32:03 -0700

Hm, good point, Nick!

The titlecase version of œ looks very desirable indeed, from a typographic point of view!

(One more idea collected).

I for one will take these

Eben Sorkin — Sun, 6 Apr 2008 08:58:25 -0700

I for one will take these glyphs more seriously now.... Thanks!

«I guess the French Academy

Oisín — Sun, 6 Apr 2008 07:50:06 -0700

«I guess the French Academy decided so.»

Well, I, as a Dane, am not one to lambast language councils for their sometimes dubitable decisions, considering how the Danish Language Council regularly butchers loan words in Danish in an attempt to make them ‘easier’ for Danes.

I quote, haphazardly, majonæse (for mayonnaise), konjak (for cognac), or risalamande (for ris à l’amande). The last one in particular grinds me, since risalamande is not even any more logical or phonetic in Danish than ris à l’amande.

The “Petit Robert”

Michel Boyer — Sun, 6 Apr 2008 07:24:57 -0700

The “Petit Robert” online leaves no choice for the physical unit (with IPA pronunciation between brackets, as usual):

œrsted [œʀstɛd] nom masculin

Encyclopædia Universalis (online) seems to leave no other choice either for the physicist; they write « ŒRSTED ou ØRSTED HANS CHRISTIAN (1777-1851) ».

I guess the French Academy decided so.

( Whoopsies—I never did

Oisín — Sun, 6 Apr 2008 06:46:42 -0700

( Whoopsies—I never did claim to particularly proficient in French gender association :-P )

I have to say I’d far prefer simply Oersted, or even Orsted, to Œrsted. The former two give a clear indication that they are ‘simplified’ spellings for use when Ø is not available; the latter just seems an odd, misplaced Frenchification more likely to cause confusion than anything.

Mon dieu, quelle horreur

Michel Boyer — Sun, 6 Apr 2008 06:10:30 -0700

Mon dieu, quelle horreur !

For those that conclude that their font might now require an “Ø” for use in Canada, that must be a shock indeed.

Titlecase digraphs

Nick Shinn — Fri, 4 Apr 2008 13:29:02 -0700

What is the opinion of these?
IMO they improve words like œuf.