Re: Define French as a separate input language (issue 288290043 by address@hidden)

[David Kastrup]

Valentin Villenave <address@hidden> writes:

> On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 12:32 AM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Seriously?  I mean, no German would think about leaving off umlauts from
>> a letter under any circumstance
>
> Well, in German it can alter the meaning (or at least distinguish
> between plural and singular). In French it’s a bit rarer. (Although
> when speaking out loud, nobody would say "Frankais" instead of
> "Français", which is what you get when you remove the cédille.)
>
> That being said, I still very much do take issue with the German
> reform that tends to replace "ich muß" with "ich muss" :-)
>
>> So one can forget "ç" in French?  Wow.  How did that come about?
>
> Well, I’m dealing with very computer-illiterate people: retired people
> who didn’t use a computer at work, younger people whose only dealings
> with written French come from hasty SMS texting...

Oh come on.  Particularly the computer illiterate will know how to work
a typewriter.  French typewriters are not reduced to ASCII (and even if
they are, you can overprint a comma).  And particularly with "hasty SMS
texting" the completions provided by T9 and its ilk tend to add the
diacritics on its own (as long as it provides the word at all, unlike
"suspekt -> rüsselü", and that still is diacritically enriched).

Well, I'm coming from a TeX tradition.  Donald Knuth actually related in
a talk that he picked a longer way to work explicitly in order to avoid
having a typographically awful road sign kill his mood for the day every
morning.

-- 
David Kastrup