Typing special French and German characters with standard US keyboard

Posted by vaishali_iware in Blog   Sep,24     No comments

Typing special French and German characters with standard US keyboard.

A word about special characters.

1.German has two kinds of special characters, Umlauts and Eszett. Umlaut stands for um+Laut which means change+sound and so with umlaut, vowel pronunciation changes. Only the vowels a, e and o take the form ä,ë and ö whereas eszett character, also called as sharp s looks like ß.

Though it looks similar to Greek beta symbol, it is different. It never appears at the beginning of a word and if for whatever reasons you decide to write German words Straße and Maße (as in measure) in all caps, they are written as STRASSE and MASZE respectively, so there is no capital version of this character. Schweizerdeutsch (Swiss German) never uses ß character but rather uses two s characters ss in its place. With standard German, Rechtschreibreform (orthography reform) governs whether to use ss or ß in a particular word, but even if you write river as Fluss or Fluß, there is no change in the pronunciation so ß can be considered as a typographic ligature.

2. French on the other hand has five types of accents. Accent grave (grave accent) which can appear on top of vowels a, e and u and make them look like à, è and ù respectively. Accent aigu (acute accent) can appear only on top of e and make it look é. Both these accent marks alter the vowel pronunciation. Accent circonflexe (circumflex accent) can appear on top of a, e, o and u and makes them appear â,ê,ô and û respectively. This accent mark does not alter vowel pronunciation. So French word hôpital would be pronounced exactly the same even if circumflex were absent, which by the way stands for hospital. There is a theory which says that in some words “s” character following the vowel, over time, got replaced by circumflex. Accent tréma (diaeresis) is like German umlaut and can appear on top of e, i and u. It never appears on top of an isolated vowel, but only when two or more vowels are together in a word and it forces separate pronunciation of the vowel having diaeresis. Naïve is a good example of this, where a and i are pronounced separately. Though umlaut and diaeresis have identical visual appearance their purpose in German and French is different. Accent mark Cédille (cedilla) is only accent mark in French which appears below a character and that too only below consonant c and make it sound like s. There are four more special guys in French to make life difficult. Small œ, capital Œ and small ÿ and capital Ÿ. Among single byte encodings, ISO 8859-1, also referred to as Latin-I does not include first two and the last guy where as Windows-1252 and ISO 8859-15 does include all of them. Legend has it that French delegate consisting of an engineer was convinced that ligature œ was useless and so it did not make its way in Latin-I. Character ÿ is extremely rare whereas œ does appear in few words.

1.German uses two styles of quotation marks. Quoted statements are included either within „ and “ or within » and « characters where as in French quoted statements are included within « and » characters. Both characters « and » are part of ISO-8859-1 but not „ and “.

Typing special characters

Yogesh Ketkar { August,24 2010 }