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Subject: 1.8(by Tor Slettnes)What are Nordic graphemes?
Nordic graphemes can in this context be described as:
Graphical representations of the letters that exist in the various Nordic (i.e. Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Finnish) alphabets, beyond those that exist in the English alphabet.Each of the Nordic written languages uses some additional letters compared to English. These are, in order of appearance in the alphabets:
Letter: Languages used: Pronounced like: character:
________________________________________________________________
a acute is 'ou' in "loud" á
eth is 'th' in "there" ð
e acute is (dk, no, se, fi) 'ea' in "yeah" é
i acute is 'e' in "he" í
o acute is 'o' in "home" ó
u acute is 'ou' in "you" ú
y acute is 'e' in "he" ý
thorn is 'th' in "thumb" þ
ae is 'i' in "hi" æ
dk, no 'a' in "bad" æ
o-slash dk, no 'i' in "bird" ø
a-ring dk, no, se (fi) 'o' in "bored" å
a diaeresis se, fi 'a' in "bad" ä
o diaeresis se, fi, is 'i' in "bird" ö
u diaeresis (se, fi, dk, no) 'ue' in french "rue" ü
A set of parentheses around the country code indicates that the
letter is rarely used in the corresponding language, typically only
for loan words or names originating from another language. Other
accents, such as ^ (circumflex) and accent-grave
are now and then used in foreign names and words in all Nordic
languages.
In Denmark and Norway the alphabet is ordered:
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z æ ø å
In Icelandic eth is regarded as a variant of 'd',
while thorn, ae-ligature and o-diaeresis comes in the end:
a á b c d ð e é f g h i í j k l m n o ó p q r s t u ú v w x y ý z þ æ ö
For Finland and Sweden the order is:
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z å ä ö
If your curiosity isn't satisfied by the pronounciation guide above, there are more extensive comments in the various language sections of this faq.
The "mother" of all modern character sets for computers is the original ASCII character set, now renamed to US-ASCII. (ASCII = "American Standard Code for Information Interchange"). This is a 7-bit set containing the characters needed to write American English without accents or special letters, and little more. No "foreign" letters are included.
Various standards exist for representing extra characters, some of which are: Digraph, LaTeX, ISO-646, ISO-8859-1, and the IBM codepages 437, 850, and 865. All of these sets, except the IBM codepages, are usually considered acceptable on soc.culture.nordic, e-mail, and the internet in general.
Digraphs are two-character combinations used for simplicity, and are often the most universally understood notation on soc .culture .nordic. However, when using these to non-Nordics, one should be careful to explain that these are digraphs, not two separate characters. Also, some information may get lost by using digraphs, since a filtering program will not be able to determine whether it is really a digraph or two separate characters.
LaTeX notation comes from the typesetting program by the same name, where a sequence starting with '\' may be substituted with a given character. For instance, the a-ring is written as "\aa" or "{\aa}" in LaTeX.
ISO-646 (really ISO-646-NO and ISO-646-SE) are 7-bit sets similar to US-ASCII, but with national characters substituted in place of the following characters: {, |, }, [, \, ]. This is the oldest one of the "true representation" standards mentioned here; it was used in e.g. the Nordic versions of the CP/M operating system, prior to MS-DOS. Today, it is mostly used in Sweden and Finland (although the ordering of the letters, for the sake of compability with the Danish /Norwegian /German equivalents, are not correct in these languages).
ISO-8859-1, also called ISO Latin-1, is the first of several 8-bit character sets described in International Standards Organization's document 8859. (ISO is the maintainer of the meter, the kilogram, etcetera.) This sets include all characters needed for all West European languages, leave Sámi and Esperanto. Latin-1 is a superset of US-ASCII, hence all ASCII characters maintain their original position in this set. Rather than trying to accomodate positioning in any spesific language, the letters in ISO-8859-1 are ordered according to the alphabetical position of their US-ASCII lookalikes. Latin-1 is supported through modern standardizations like MIME (RFC 1521).
The IBM codepages 437, 850, 861 and 865 are used on Personal Computers in "text" mode, and is also the default set on many MS-Windows ® communication programs. Out of the Big Blue, they were created to provide text-based PC programs with a means to create low-cost graphics, and the addition of extra characters came as a nice side effect. (Certain Nordic characters were not represented in the original codepage 437, with the consequence that in Iceland, Denmark and Norway, computers would occasionally be sold with cp 861 or 865 in the hardware. Today, alternative codepages can be downloaded to the video card via software). The Danish /Norwegian character o-slash is not represented in cp 437, and in 850 /861 /865 it is positioned with the dangerous code 155 (9B hex) -- "Upper Escape". Certain terminal types will interpret this code as the initial character of a escape command, and may e.g. clear the screen depending on the next letter. Further, it is incompatible with the established 8-bit standard Latin-1, and should be avoided.
The various notations of the Nordic graphemes follow:
Letter Digraph LaTeX ISO-646 ISO-8859-1
HTML Octal Char
_________________________________ _____________________________________
a acute A' \'{A} - alt-0193 Á Á \301 Á
a' \'{a} - alt-0225 á á \341 á
eth TH - alt-0208 Ð Ð \320 Ð
th - alt-0240 ð ð \360 ð
e acute E' \'{E} - alt-0201 É É \311 É
e' \'{e} - alt-0233 é é \351 é
i acute I' \'{I} - alt-0205 Í Í \315 Í
i' \'{i} - alt-0237 í í \355 í
o acute O' \'{O} - alt-0211 Ó Ó \323 Ó
o' \'{o} - alt-0243 ó ó \363 ó
u acute U' \'{U} - alt-0218 Ú Ú \332 Ú
u' \'{u} - alt-0250 ú ú \372 ú
y acute Y' \'{Y} - alt-0221 Ý Ý \335 Ý
y' \'{y} - alt-0253 ý ý \375 ý
thorn TH - alt-0222 Þ Þ ; \336 Þ
th - alt-0254 þ þ \376 þ
u diaeresis U" \"{U} ^ alt-0220 Ü Ü \334 Ü
u" \"{u} ~ alt-0252 ü ü \374 ü
ae AE {\AE} [ alt-0198 Æ Æ \306 Æ
ae {\ae} { alt-0230 æ æ \346 æ
o-slash OE {\OE} \ alt-0216 Ø Ø \330 Ø
oe {\oe} | alt-0248 ø ø \370 ø
a-ring AA {\AA} ] alt-0197 Å Å \305 Å
aa {\aa} } alt-0229 å å \345 å
a diaeresis A" \"{A} [ alt-0196 Ä Ä \304 Ä
a" \"{a} { alt-0228 ä ä \344 ä
o diaeresis O" \"{O} \ alt-0214 Ö Ö \326 Ö
o" \"{o} | alt-0246 ö ö \366 ö
The ISO-646 charsets for Denmark/Norway [ iso-646-NO ] and Finland/Sweden [ iso-646-SE ] are in practice
obsolete, and there never existed one for Icelandic, but you may run
into older 7-bits text files using them. It is to be noted that
'Ü' is not represented in iso-646-NO for Denmark/Norway.
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Some pros and cons for each set:
Character set: Advantages: Disadvantages:
__________________________________________________________________
Digraphs * Requires 7-bit only * Ambiguous
("oe" or "o-slash"?)
* Non-optimal compromise
LaTeX * Non-ambiguous 7-bit * Made for typesetting;
representation. somewhat cryptic for
regular text.
* Non-optimal compromise
ISO-646-SE, * Only 7-bit "true" * Different standards
ISO-646-DK representation. for each language
<[\]{|}> * No data loss even * Getting harder to
with old hardware/ find font support
software/setup. (Dying out).
* Shadows the brace,
sqare bracket, pipe,
and backslash chars.
ISO Latin 1 * Utilizes all 8 bits * Requires 8-bit clean
(ISO-8859-1) in a byte; yet avoids connection; older
<ÐÞÆØÅÄÖðþæøåäö..> dangerous codes. systems may cause
* Universal for all data loss.
Western European * May require some
languages. setup.
* Supported by ISO and * In case of stripping,
MIME; true subset of becomes "FXEDVfxedv";
Unicode. difficult to read.
IBM CodePages * Uses all 256 codes; * Uses all 256 codes;
Machintosh set more characters incl. dangerous ones.
<Unacceptable> * Often used in PC * Incompatible with
environments such as the "de-facto" 8-bit
BBS'es. standard ISO-8859-1
__________________________________________________________________
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Denmark/Norway: tr '\\]{|}' '\330\305\346\370\345'
Sweden/Finland: tr '\\]{|}' '\326\305\344\366\345'
alias rn "rn | tr '\\]{|}' '\330\305\346\370\345'"
Note that if you use this kind of translation, you will no longer see any of the characters '\]{|}'; in most cases this outweighs the benefits from seeing the national letters.
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RXML parse error: No current scope. | <if variable="print is 1"> | <if not="not" variable="print is 1"> | <if not="not" variable="print is 1">the Nordic languages
The ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1) set is currently the most common character representation standard on soc.culture.nordic, and is also quite frequent in e.g. soc.culture.german, personal e-mail etc. However, on many systems, the ability to view these characters is not provided as "default", so you may need to configure some things on your own.
A note to Windows programmers: Let the underlying keyboard drivers, run-time libararies etc. take care of keyboard input. Only be sure that the 8th bit is not stripped/masked away.
stty -istrip pass8
tr '\306\330\305\304\326\346\370\345\344\366' '[\\][\\{|}{|'
(standard-display-european t)
(set-input-mode (car (current-input-mode)) (nth 1 (current-input-mode)) 0)Note that in cases where the Meta key is represented by setting the 8th (high) bit, (ie. if you are not using X-windows), this line will disable the Meta key, so you will subsequently have to use "ESC x" to generate "M-x".
Otherwise, insert the following line:
(load-library "iso-insert")
(global-set-key "\C-t" 8859-1-map)
C-x 8 d gives ð (eth) C-x 8 t gives þ (thorn) C-x 8 a e gives æ (ae) C-x 8 / o gives ø (o-slash) C-x 8 a a gives å (a-ring) C-x 8 " a gives ä (a diaeresis) C-x 8 " o gives ö (o diaeresis) C-x 8 ' a gives á (a acute) C-x 8 ' i gives í (i acute)
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I am: Tor Slettnes.
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- Is the text above
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- See the discussion in |
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