Alan Watson scripsit: > I am curious as to how Unicode supports case-folding in Mexican > Spanish, in which lower-case letters may have accents but uppercase > letters do not. So, for example, the upper case versions of "esta", > "está", and "ésta" are all "ESTA". I would guess that it follows > Peninsular Spanish and uses "ESTA", "ESTÁ", and "ÉSTA"?
With the exception of the four characters involved in Turkish dotted and dotless I, Unicode case folding is not localized. If you want localization, you use ISO 14651, which is defined in terms of sorting and searching rather than folding. I'm not familiar with the rule you mention in Spanish, but I am familiar with the rule in French. Through most of the 20th century, hexagonal French dropped accents on capital letters, whereas Quebec French did not. The sole reason for the hexagonal rule was the limitations of standard French typewriters, which had no keys or typebars for upper-case accented letters. The Canadian French standard keyboard uses dead keys and doesn't have this problem. As a compromise, the Academie decided that accents on capital letters are optional in standard orthography. Nevertheless, dictionaries (including the Academie's) and other books where orthography was critical have always used accents on upper-case letters, and French spelling correctors (human and algorithmic) will change lower-case accented letters at the beginning of a sentence to upper case. In addition, sometimes the distinction is critical: if you want to sell BISCUITS SALÉS (salted crackers), you won't get far labeling them as BISCUITS SALES (dirty crackers)! I strongly suspect that the current Spanish story is that official orthography requires them, in Mexico as well as in Spain; that older usage made them optional to cope with broken typewriter layouts; and that on the Internet they are often dropped even in lower case, as is true of most languages written informally. A little googling found SE HA MUERTO EL PAPÁ vs. SE HA MUERTO EL PAPA, and HABLO INGLÉS vs. HABLO INGLES (groins) as fine Spanish examples of the importance of capitalizing accented letters. -- Knowledge studies others / Wisdom is self-known; John Cowan Muscle masters brothers / Self-mastery is bone; [email protected] Content need never borrow / Ambition wanders blind; http://ccil.org/~cowan Vitality cleaves to the marrow / Leaving death behind. --Tao 33 (Bynner) _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
