Timeline for Why are J, U, W considered part of the basic Latin Alphabet?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 26, 2021 at 13:08 | vote | accept | Schezuk | ||
| Feb 28, 2021 at 1:57 | comment | added | Schezuk | @supercat The original Morse code, or American Morse or Railroad code, saw no adoption beyond North America. The Continental or International Morse code was largely based on Gerke's Hamburg alphabet which included Umlaut letters and digraph Ch but did NOT distinguish I and J, which was supplemented from Steinheil's code. The ITU adopted even more accented letters in their conventions(say 1868), and you can still see the E Acute inherited by recent ITU-R recommendations. Non-English morse code outnumbered letters in English but shared less codepoints. | |
| Feb 27, 2021 at 20:03 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| Feb 28, 2021 at 12:24 | |||||
| Feb 27, 2021 at 17:18 | comment | added | supercat | @Schezuk: How about Morse Code, which I should have mentioned as an even earlier means of transmitting text? | |
| Feb 26, 2021 at 2:58 | comment | added | Schezuk | @supercat However, original Continental Baudot code included É, too. | |
| Feb 25, 2021 at 14:26 | comment | added | supercat | The use of an alphabet that includes j, u, and w, but excludes some other characters goes back way before ASCII. Baudot code also used such an alphabet, as did many typewriters. | |
| Feb 25, 2021 at 14:25 | comment | added | supercat | @JanusBahsJacquet: The claim about w being a ligature doesn't seem like it would have emerged in a vacwm. | |
| Feb 25, 2021 at 11:01 | comment | added | IMSoP | As a slightly pedantic nit-pick, there is no "eight-bit ASCII"; there are, as you say, lots of different standards that extend or provide compatibility with ASCII. The most common are the ISO-8859 family, along with vendor-specific encodings like Windows 1252. | |
| Feb 25, 2021 at 0:21 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @chrylis-cautiouslyoptimistic- In English, the ligatures are non-canonical and can always be substituted for <ae, oe>. In other languages, they are canonical and not equivalent to the sequences (cf. Danish aer ‘pets, strokes’ vs ær ‘maple tree’). Even in English, not all cases of <ae, oe> can be written <æ, œ>, so the two are not bidirectionally equivalent (e.g., fœtus, though unetymological, is still seen, but *gœs and *dœs are utterly unknown in Modern English). And as the question mentions, <w> is just a ligature of <uu> or <vv>. | |
| Feb 25, 2021 at 0:11 | comment | added | chrylis -cautiouslyoptimistic- | @JanusBahsJacquet Technically, æ is merely a graphical flourish (a ligature) for the characters ae. | |
| Feb 24, 2021 at 21:42 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | I’d definitely say œ and especially æ were more common in the ’50s than they are now, but they’ve been in steady decline for well over a century. I’m sure the onset of electronic communication had some measurable effect, but I would guess it’s less significant than the general decline that was already underway. | |
| Feb 24, 2021 at 17:45 | comment | added | Draconis♦ | @JanusBahsJacquet True, though even in British English I'm more used to seeing oe and ae than œ and æ. I wonder if there was a measurable decline in the non-ASCII variants in published works when electronic communication caught on (and thus people saw and used the ASCII ones more)? | |
| Feb 24, 2021 at 17:37 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | You could argue that Basic Latin doesn’t even cater to English as such, but specifically to American English, excluding codes for variant forms primarily found in British English such as œconomics, mediæval, façade, café (in increasing order of usage). | |
| Feb 24, 2021 at 16:04 | history | answered | Draconis♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |