[Info-vax] Micro Focus to be acquired by Open Text

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2022-09-03 15:34, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> In article <tevcei$9eq$1 at news.misty.com>, Johnny Billquist
> <bqt at softjar.se> writes:
> 
>> I think your news reader can't deal with UTF-8. My post's headers say:
>>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
>>
>> Yours say:
>>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-15
>>
>> So your newsreader probably tries to process everything it receives as
>> ISO-8859-15, and then my post turns out the way you see it.
> 
> Right.  I would be happy to install a UTF newsreader on VMS.  :-|

Ah. So that's where you're sitting. Yeah, then it all makes sense. :-)

>> Yeah. I was essentially saying that ä is considered a variant or
>> combination of a possibly followed by e in German, while in Swedish it
>> is a unique letter of its own, with its own place in the alphabet. No
>> relationship with a at all.
> 
> That is true today.  Historically, it was borrowed from German.

Who knows who borrowed from who, or if it was actually borrowed or just 
grew out from the same sources. (Yes, I do find such implied claims of 
ownership somewhat strange.)

> Interestingly, when 8-bit characters are not available, Germans usually
> write "ae" for "ä" and Swedes write "a".

True. And funny. I guess it's because since in Swedish, we never 
consider ä to be just a different form of ae, it don't come naturally to 
try to think, or write it as such. So the closest is to try and find 
something that is visually close, and that leads to a.
Basically another effect of ä being a letter of its own.

   johnny