Re: "Kerning?" (fwd)

[Robert Holmgren holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to note from Peter Evans  Thu, 20 Feb 1997 15:02:32 +0900
>  
> Dick Weltz, whose other erudite comments surely qualify him for invitation
> to participate directly in this mailing list, writes:
  
>> it is likely that kerning ["i" and "j"] . . . caused the
>> compterniks who designed the ASCII character set to imagine that there
>> really is such a character as a y with dieresis (no such animal in any
>> modern language).

These are minor matters, and everybody may be "right" in some measure; I'd
press the following ideas in counterpoint to Mr. Weltz (just as I slip out of
town). Dutch is the closest of all Germanic languages to English; Frisian Dutch
is English's nearest parent. English "y" derives from Dutch "ij" ("y"

has another source also, namely Dutch "ge", as geclipod==>yclept,
gedicht==>ydight). In the 16th century (the earliest Dutch that I'm familiar
with), the letters "ij" were pronounced as a diphthong, or two discreet vowel
sounds linked together by a sliding vocalisation (so my Dutch friends utter
them; it sounds peculiar to them). An analogous sound might be Yiddish "oy" or
English "boy". Two sounds linger faintly in a word like "ice" -- but the
diphthong is pretty much gone in English. However, it was certainly present in
19th century Dutch, and earlier in French (and it was _spelled_, & it *still* is
spelled in some quarters, with a capital Y diaeresis!). German Isolde=French
Y(diaeresis)seult=Dutch Ijsulde (Iseult, she of the White Hands, literally means
"ice rule" -- and ice in Dutch is "ijs"). A river flowing through the Flemish
(Dutch-speaking) country (in Belgium) is the Y(diaeresis)ser (famous skating).
Y(diaeresis)pres=Ijper.

In short, I'd question whether Y diaeresis, while rare, is a "computernik"
fabrication. Moreover, I have old Dutch books printed in stylised serif type
where I cannot tell whether "ij" or "y(diaeresis)" is intended, so similar is
their appearance. This leads me to wonder whether typographers might not have
played a key role in this transformation.

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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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