6 ms·

What do you mean by "special"? If you mean "can be encoded in US-ASCII", then that's a bit circular, because that character set was obviously designed to encode

What do you mean by "special"? If you mean "can be encoded in US-ASCII", then that's a bit circular, because that character set was obviously designed to encode the English language. In a parallel universe where the ancient Romans had designed a character set, it would be the English language that would require all those weird unicode characters like "J" and "U" (which didn't exist in the Roman alphabet).

TulliusCicero 9y ago
I meant that at least AFAIK all the English characters exist in several languages. No special tics or dots that are unique or very unusual.
- CrystalLangUser 9y ago
  > tics or dots that are unique or very unusual It's almost like a lot of languages have a shared ancestry. Differences may be unusual to you. Are ș, î, or ț unusual because they don't exist in English? Those phonemes aren't common in English which is why we don't have distinctions for them, but they're important in Romanian. Not unusual at all if you're Romanian. By your logic, 대한민국 characters are weird and unusual also, and so on...
  - TulliusCicero 9y ago
    Yes, hangul is unusual, because there's only one language that uses it. Duh. Latin characters are less unusual because tons of languages use them. I'm not sure why this is difficult to grasp.
    - Tepix 9y ago
      Tons of languages use é, ø, and other accents so they are "normal" by your definition.
Tomte 9y ago
Except "café"
- Symbiote 9y ago
  And naïve, and façade, and mediæval, and coöperate, which are either correct spellings, or a matter of editorial style.
thaumasiotes 9y ago
It actually seems fairly intuitive to view Ä as a cheap knockoff of A whereas U and W are independent forms. That would be wrong -- as the name suggests, W derives from U, similarly to how G, J, R, and U derive from C, I, P, and V. But it shouldn't be hard to see the intuition behind the idea that s is a "natural" letter and š is an unnatural modification.

TulliusCicero 9y ago

I meant that at least AFAIK all the English characters exist in several languages. No special tics or dots that are unique or very unusual.

CrystalLangUser 9y ago
> tics or dots that are unique or very unusual It's almost like a lot of languages have a shared ancestry. Differences may be unusual to you. Are ș, î, or ț unusual because they don't exist in English? Those phonemes aren't common in English which is why we don't have distinctions for them, but they're important in Romanian. Not unusual at all if you're Romanian. By your logic, 대한민국 characters are weird and unusual also, and so on...
- TulliusCicero 9y ago
  Yes, hangul is unusual, because there's only one language that uses it. Duh. Latin characters are less unusual because tons of languages use them. I'm not sure why this is difficult to grasp.
  - Tepix 9y ago
    Tons of languages use é, ø, and other accents so they are "normal" by your definition.

Tomte 9y ago

Except "café"

Symbiote 9y ago
And naïve, and façade, and mediæval, and coöperate, which are either correct spellings, or a matter of editorial style.

thaumasiotes 9y ago

It actually seems fairly intuitive to view Ä as a cheap knockoff of A whereas U and W are independent forms. That would be wrong -- as the name suggests, W derives from U, similarly to how G, J, R, and U derive from C, I, P, and V. But it shouldn't be hard to see the intuition behind the idea that s is a "natural" letter and š is an unnatural modification.