andrel schrieb:

> Nowadays with unicode we have a choice, well sort of at least. There 
> were times that most displays physically only supported ASCII and many 
> programming languages also only supported ASCII.
> The problem for the 'IJ' is on the one hand worse than for e.g. the 
> eszett because everybody knows it is an 'i' and a 'j' together, and we 
> have always used that on typewriters. Now it is easy to add ligatures to 
> a font set the 'IJ' ligature is still not often used. Partly because 
> many look ugly and don't seem to fit into the font and partly because 
> not many people mourn the loss of Dutch culture.
> The problem of the eszett (and umlaut) is OTOH perhaps a bit worse 
> because the Germans seem to have yielded to American imperialism by 
> changing their spelling rules so that German can now be spelled using 
> ASCII only.

UR doin' it wrong.

In the good old times of 7-bit ASCII, we Germans had our own version, 
the "GSCII", where we'd replace some rarely-used characters with the 
German umlauts, sz-ligature and even the paragraph sign. Some computers 
would have switches to toggle between different character ROMs for ASCII 
and GSCII, while printers would have control sequences to activate GSCII.

In the times of 8-bit character sets, we Germans had our own 8-bit 
codepage on the IBM computers (well, not exactly our own - we shared it 
with other Western Eurpoean languages), and our own keyboard layouts.

And no, German spelling has /not/ been changed to "yield to American 
imperialism". We still have the umlauts (with which we didn't change a 
thing), and despite some people believing the contrary, we didn't do 
away with the sz ligature either; we just changed the rules to make it 
easier to know when to use the sz ligature and when not to, and while 
this has effectively reduced the cases in which it is used, there are 
still plenty of words in which it still constitutes the only proper 
spelling.

We have a long tradition though how to deal with cases where the umlauts 
and/or the sz ligature are not available (the sz ligature, in 
particular, has never been available in all-uppercase spelling). /And/, 
as mentioned before, we insisted on /not/ using ASCII, /not/ using 
American keyboard layouts, etc.; so the Dutch "ij" issue seems to me not 
so much a problem of "American imperialism", but laziness on the Dutch 
side to /maintain/ their culture.

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