Re: Dutch IJ, again

From: "Pim Blokland" <pblokland@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "Unicode mailing list" <unicode@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2003 11:45 AM
Subject: Re: Dutch IJ, again


> Philippe Verdy schreef:
> 
> > i+j is a single combined Dutch ij character only if its not
> followed by a vowel
> 
> This is not true; where did you get that idea?
> It almost always IS a diphtong (cf words like bijen, vrijaf, zijig)
> except where the i and the j happen to be in separate syllables
> (bijou, bijectie).

Do you mean that there is no possible inference rule ? I didnot want to be 
exaustive there, because your sample words where ij is a diphtong effectiely 
can be exceptions (or the two other words may be exceptions to the "normal" 
Dutch rules). I'm not a Dutch expert to be affirmative, I just wanted to give 
an idea with an example of such a possible rule.

Well, it may appear that in general "ij" is always a single diphtong, unless 
there's an hypenation candidate between two syllables. In that case the problem 
becomes as complex as determining syllable breaks for hyphenation.

For now there does not seem to exist a clear definition of what could be a good 
localized breaker for grapheme clusters, as it also implies an analysis of 
syllables in Dutch or other languages (for now, only abjads and Asian scripts 
seem to have a normalized algorithm for the determination of such grapheme 
clusters, and there remains a lot of work to do with alphabetized languages, 
which seem to use letters in a way much more complex than expected).

Still I'm not convinced that the explicit "ij" diphtong is really different 
from an i + j pair for Dutch, which uses a lexical-based approach (so the 
combined character "ij" may just be there only for compatibility with some 
legacy usages, as most rendering of Dutch text does not allow a reader to make 
a difference between a combined ij cluster and separated i+j letters; the 
separation does not come from letters themselves but from the lexical knowledge 
of the reader).

The special typographic case of inter-letter spacing for justification is not 
dramatic (because other typographic rules also require that no excessive 
spacing is used.) Exception to this case is the usage of artificially expanded 
text where the typographic effect is used as a way to emphasize a title or 
mark, and it is very near from a logographic design, where the form rather than 
the semantic is considered more important (is such usage still text ? Shouldn't 
this be excluded from Unicode standardization as it requires a necessary markup 
out of the scope of Unicode, to handle this case as a form of typographic *art* 
?).

It would be interesting to analyze the way UCA behaves for the collation of 
Dutch text...


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