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Re: On language-dependent defaults for character-folding


From: Óscar Fuentes
Subject: Re: On language-dependent defaults for character-folding
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2016 11:03:09 +0100
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/25.0.50 (gnu/linux)

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> If ñ is meant to be read as ñ
>
> Don't you see them displayed identically in Emacs (and in any other
> program that correctly implements display of combining accents)?
> Maybe I don't really understand that "if" part.

They look a bit different here.

>> as when it is found on a Spanish word,
>
> Display of combining accents is not language-specific.  It should
> always happen in human-readable text.
>
>> then ñ and ñ are the same to all effects, so no match should happen.
>
> You mean, a match should happen, right?

ñ shall match ñ, but n shall not match either, from an Spaniard POV.

> Otherwise, I'm afraid I see
> no sense in this logic: IMO identically looking text should match, or
> else users will kill us.

Agreed, although in practice your example is not a big issue since I do
expect to rarely see ñ (the composed variant) used in Spanish text. And
probably not easy to implement at all for the general case (all
identical-looking combinations for all languages).

> If you agree that a match is TRT in these (and other similar) cases,
> then you should agree that _some_ form of character folding should be
> turned on by default.

I see where are you coming from ;-) On my first message on this thread I
said that I was ambivalent wrt the default status of this feature,
before finding the n/ñ issue. Not so after. A Spaniard could also deem
useful to match ú and ü while searching for u. See, the problem here is
not character-folding itsef, but how it works: a non-Spaniard could
expect matching ñ while searching for n, because for him ñ is a `n' with
a tilde, which is essentially the same case as the `u' example mentioned
above but from the POV of someone who doesn't know Spanish. (*)

[snip]

* My English dictionary says:

1. tilde -- (a diacritical mark (~) placed over the letter n in Spanish
to indicate a palatal nasal sound or over a vowel in Portuguese to
indicate nasalization)


No wonder that so many people seems to have a hard time recognizing that
ñ is a letter like any other in Spanish, not just an `n' with a tilde.



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