letters of the alphabet

[A. Vine]

Forward all this to the Unicode list and see how many answers you get...
;-}

After "listening in" to the discussions about writing systems, what is a
charatcer, what is a letter, what is an alphabet, etc., I'm convinced that it's
all in the mind of the user.

To me, French has all the same letters, because the diacritics are handled
separately from the base letter.  Think in terms of their sorting rules - given
several words which only differ in their diacritics, the sort order is based on
diacritics from right to left, whereas the letters are judged from left to
right.  If you ask a French person to name the glyph "é" s/he would say, in
French, "e accent acute", or "e with acute accent", rather than some other name
for the letter.  Further, if you asked a French person to write the entire
alphabet, s/he would write:

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

And, I just tested this on a French person.

Now, were you to ask about Norwegian...

Lynne Murphy wrote:
>
> Mark Mandel said:
> > Agreed... except that they don't use the same alphabet. French has [pause to
> > write and count], I make it thirteen letters that English doesn't:
> >
> > diacritic
> > acute               e
> > circumflex     a    e    i    o    u
> > grave          a    e              u
> > dieresis            e    i               y
> > cedilla    c
> >
> > That's not relevant to the answer, of course.
> >
> > And French is nearly as bad as English in this respect.
>
> I was aware that French and English don't have all the same letters (e.g.,
> you'll only find K in borrowings), but this doesn't necessarily mean that they
> don't have the same alphabet.  Depends, of course, on how you define alphabet.
>
> True:  English and French both use the roman alpabet.
> (which is what I was meaning in my message)
> i.e., their alphabets come from the same source and share most of the same
> symbols, so that you can basically use the same keyboard for both (although
> there are different keyboards available for each).
>
> True: English and French have the same sets of letters.
> if you define letters (as I do) as unanalysable units that represent sounds.
> The letter-diacritic combinations that French has are, in this view, more akin
> to digraphs like 'ph' than to letters.  But Mark's defining letters as units
> that can have more than one part (but apparently only take up one space on a
> line of type).
>
> But,
>
> False:  English and French use the same symbols for writing.
>
> False: English and French have the same orthography.

--
Andrea Vine, avine at eng.sun.com, iPlanet i18n architect
"The complementarity of priority information actions will reinforce
individual projects and, in particular, those relating to the Euro."
--From the "Information Programme for the European Citizen"