Re: [xsl] Does 'Lec?ur' occur in $text ? Do you have a multi-fa ctor XPath solution?

Subject: Re: [xsl] Does 'Lec?ur' occur in $text ? Do you have a multi-fa ctor XPath solution?
From: Louis-Dominique Dubeau <ldd@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2013 21:09:49 -0500
(Hmm... there's something funny going on with character coding. I'm not
sure where it is coming from...)

On Fri, 2013-01-18 at 19:30 -0500, G. Ken Holman wrote:
> So, is "B" not a ligature or is it just that 
> Unicode does not provide a decomposition?

I think historically E is a ligature, in the sense that it was born as a
combination of two letters. However, as far as French spelling is
concerned (to take just one language), it is not strictly speaking
equivalent to oe. It is not like the "fi" or "ff" ligatures, which are
purely stylistic (in the languages I know anyway). If one wants to
follow the rules of French spelling to the last detail then coeur is not
correct (and indeed my spell checker underlines it), cEur is the proper
spelling.

This being said, native speakers do not always follow the rules
precisely. I'm a native speaker. My teachers never insisted that I make
the distinction between E and oe in handwriting. In sorting, E is
treated as oe. The letter E is not readily available on a keyboard, so
people type oe. ISO-8859-1 (aka ISO-Latin-1) did not have a code for E,
so again people had to type oe. Software like word processors
automatically correct as needed, so people can be sloppy about it. All
of these things contribute to natives not using E consistently.

Cheers,
Louis

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