Hello,
This is my first time posting here, so please forgive me if I don’t get
all the ethics right. I would like to make a case for an aspect of my
native language (Dutch) that has always been problematic in the digital
realm. Some context: I’m a (typo)graphic designer with a background in
interaction design.
In the Dutch language, acute accents are used to indicate stressed
vowels. [1] Also in the Dutch language, the digraph IJ (lowercase ij) is
considered a separate letter and a vowel. [2] Hence, when putting
emphasis on a word that contains ij, one would put acute accents over
the i and the j. [3]
This is taught in writing in primary school in the Netherlands (or at
least it was 30 years ago), but this practice is often abandoned soon
afterwards, probably because of the technical difficulty. The only way
to achieve this digitally appears to have LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH
ACUTE (U+00ED) be followed by LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS J (U+0237)
/and/ COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT (U+0301).
This poses several problems:
* It makes casual user input highly impractical;
* it adds complexity to automating the process of adding emphasis to
vowels;
* technical support is understandably lacking;
* it makes it virtually impossible for type designers to address
properly and consistently.
To me, the obvious solution to these problems would be to at least add
the following characters to the Unicode standard:
* LATIN SMALL LETTER J WITH ACUTE;
* LATIN CAPITAL LETTER J WITH ACUTE.
For completeness sake, one could also make a case for the following:
* LATIN SMALL LIGATURE IJ WITH ACUTES;
* LATIN CAPITAL LIGATURE IJ WITH ACUTES...
but since the use of the original Unicode ligatures is already
discouraged, we could probably go without those.
Sincerely,
Alexander Dekker
deidee
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_accent#Stress
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph)#Stress
