Vincent Ramos wrote:
Le Mon, 17 Nov 2003 10:44:25 -0800, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net a rit:
I can use Alt+0156 to create the ligature, but I believe that this is in the unstable area of coding. It is not normally on the keyboard. Simply using "oe" without a digraph is not a spelling error, but a breach of typographical convention.
The question is not clearly answered and many French linguists and grammarians do not agree. If you read French, I may suggest you these documents: http://www.gutenberg.eu.org/pub/GUTenberg/publicationsPDF/25-andre.pdf http://www.gutenberg.eu.org/pub/GUTenberg/publicationsPDF/22-yannis.pdf.
I've looked at them. I find the first to be terribly pedantic, and the second to really be concerned about much broader issues about digraphs in general.
Some of the French arguments are hilarious. Being outmanœvred by the Icelanders who wanted to insure that the thorn was included? Considering the digraph as a separate letter so that Georges Perec could avoid considering the e of the digraph as a real e in a novel that he wrote without using the letter e? WOW!!!
Assuming that my facts are not mistaken, the strongest argument against the digraph is that it does not even appear on a standard French keyboard.
Ec