Talk:ISO basic Latin alphabet

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Neologism?[edit]

Sorry has the neologism gone? I can't see anything that particularly stands out. 78.146.245.130 (talk) 22:40, 3 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think somebody thought that the article title was a neologism as a phrase.... AnonMoos (talk) 06:55, 4 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I suspect "Basic modern Latin alphabet" is a term made up by a Wikipedia editor and not used in the real world. The article cites no sources. A cursory Google search revealed no independent hits (i.e. excluding those which might easily have borrowed the term from Wikipedia). jnestorius(talk) 22:32, 29 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
"Basic Latin" is the name of the Unicode block which contains these characters. And "modern" is a reasonable adjective to disambiguate it from the older version which lacked a distinction between I/J and U/V/W. DanBishop (talk) 23:05, 2 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
See Template talk:Latin alphabet, it is not a neologism the article title is a descriptive one. As DanBishop it is a reasonable title to disambiguate it from the older versions. -- PBS (talk) 22:34, 1 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]
If anyone cares, the revision to which I added the {{neologism}} tag began "The Modern basic Latin alphabet is a Latin-derived alphabet and comprises 26 letters." Subsequent edits and moves by PBS and others have addressed my concerns. Thanks! jnestorius(talk) 21:09, 4 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

English the only Latin-based language not requiring diacritics?[edit]

The article states that English is the only Latin-based European language not requiring diacritics, but that depends on one's perspective. None of the following languages have letters with diacritics which constitute distinct letters in their alphabets: English, German, French, Dutch, Cornish, Lexemburgish. Diacritics used as accents are another story. English, for example, does allow diacritics as accents on some loan words at the writer's discretion. I'm not a linguist, but if someone doesn't clarify and/or expand on the passage in the article which ascertains that English is the only language based on Latin that does not require diacritics, I'm going to delete it for it can lead to readers of the artical getting the wrong idea. — Preceding unsigned comment added by TechTony (talk • contribs) 08:12, 17 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, but English is one of the very few European Latin-alphabet languages where it's never considered "wrong" as such to omit all diacritics (though in certain cases it can be considered typographically inelegant). In other words, diacritics add a certain elegant sophistication or foreign spice to English text, but are completely optional when only basic functionality is concerned. In most other European Latin-alphabet languages, diacritics are not generally optional, and omitting diacritics is simply wrong in most contexts... AnonMoos (talk) 23:35, 17 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The article states English is the only one and does so without any qualification. You stated above that English "is one of the very few", and that is not the same as "the only one", so you refute the statement in the article also. You go on further and say that "In most other European Latin-alphabet languages, diacritics are not generally optional". That is not the same as "in all other European languages, diacritics are required".TechTony (talk) 07:37, 18 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure what you're talking about -- the article says "English is the only major modern European language requiring no diacritics for native words"... AnonMoos (talk) 15:21, 18 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with TechTony that this displays an anti-diacritic POV. “Native” words include fully-naturalized borrowings such as rosé and lamé, which are distinguished by the diacritics, and which appear in professional writing and in documentary dictionaries with the diacritic. English doesn’t “require” anything, since there is no official orthography, but diacritics are an integral part of the written language.

Please cite the assertion or remove it. —Michael Z. 2013-03-23 16:05 z

Some people would say that if an English word is written with a diacritic, then that's a sign that it's not yet fully nativized (excepting "ö" after "co-" and "ë" after "re-", of course). In any case, English is the only major modern European language where it's never outright completely wrong to omit all diacritics in ordinary connected text which uses both upper- and lower-case characters. During the first era of newspaper computerization in the United States (i.e. most of the 1970s and 1980s), many newspapers (including the Los Angeles Times) had no ability to print any diacritics in article/editorial text. It would be unthinkable for a French newspaper remotely comparable in status to the Los Angeles Times to omit all diacritics, so in that respect there's a very significant difference between English and French, and I don't see that your revisions to the article really clarified things... AnonMoos (talk) 17:50, 24 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Equivalent alphabets[edit]

This section is full of WP:OR and inconsistencies, featuring a definition of an “equivalent alphabet” without any source. Worse, Spanish alphabet and Dutch alphabet from the table apparently fail to satisfy that definition. The former has the letter “ñ” which is not equivalent to “n”, and the latter has problems with “IJ (digraph)” frequently treated as a separate letter in collation algorithms. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 21:21, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Spanish was removed from the article some time ago, just for that reason (not sure how it crept back in). Dutch is complicated, because many Dutch people think that "IJ" is a separate letter, but international standards bodies seem to disagree. AnonMoos (talk) 17:59, 24 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It is capitalized as if it were a single letter in Dutch. Iceland is IJsland in Dutch, not Ijsland. This is always the case in Dutch. We do still treat it like a digraph in many other scenarios, like the au, ou, oe, ei, ie, ui, eu and ij. - Anonymous, 17.02, 22 February 2019 (UTC). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 145.5.192.177 (talk)

(ISO?) basic Latin alphabet[edit]

I'd like to bring to editors' attention that I've turned Basic Latin alphabet, which used to be a redirect to this article, into a disambiguation page. This is because I believe the term "basic" doesn't in any way restrict the connotations of "Latin alphabet" to those standardized by the ISO.

There have been edits on the articles regarding individual Latin letters, such as A, B, C, and so on, which among other thing specify at which point of the ISO basic alphabet each letter is found, to remove mentions of ISO. In this way, they ended up saying things like "W is the 23rd letter of the basic Latin alphabet", which just flies in the fact of the fact it's not considered a separate letter in a few Latin-derived alphabets, and it wasn't in the classical Latin alphabet at all, only being introduced centuries later.

What I would ideally like to end up with is a "Basic Latin alphabet" disambiguation page with an exhaustive list of articles concerning alphabets that are commonly termed "the Latin alphabet", the "letter" articles to explicitly mention and direct to the ISO basic Latin alphabet article they logically stem from, maybe while being more specific about letters that have always been in the classical Latin alphabet versus ones added later if needed, and other articles directly linking to the correct Latin-related article, except possibly in cases where Latin-related alphabets are being talked about in general terms, where maybe the disambiguation page could be linked to.

LjL (talk) 22:00, 31 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I suggest this is followed up to, if needed, on the Basic Latin alphabet talk page, where I'd consolidate any discussion spawning from the "letter articles" (A, B, C, etc.). LjL (talk) 12:51, 2 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Report of content removal[edit]

User:AnonMoos twice removed the Unish alphabet:

ArmijaDonetsk (talk) 02:27, 5 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

And I removed it because it simply isn't important enough to be included on this page. Why don't you discuss the issue, instead of "filing" a faux pseudo-"report"? -- AnonMoos (talk) 07:56, 5 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Third removal by User:AnonMoos:

For the record: It seems never before an alphabet that uses exactly the 26 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet has been removed. Seems AnonMoos has some special agenda. Also see their decoration on my talk page: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:ArmijaDonetsk&diff=607133769&oldid=607070201 ArmijaDonetsk (talk) 02:38, 7 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Dude, your phoney "reports" are completely and utterly meaningless, and no one on Wikipedia cares about them except you. Instead, why don't you address the substance of my objection that "Unish" is simply not important enough to be included on this article?? That would be far more constructive than all of your bogus "report"[sic] "filing"... AnonMoos (talk) 02:51, 7 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I may be terribly late to the party, but I for one support the removal of Unish, since it's basically simplified English-based pidgin, and not a very major language. |?| JapanYoshi 12:48, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

Writing Systems Using Fewer Letters[edit]

What about the languages that use no extra letters, but rather, use fewer letters? Hawaiian is one example I can think off the top of my head. |?| JapanYoshi 12:53, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

Requested move 11 April 2015[edit]

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: not moved. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 17:18, 22 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

ISO basic Latin alphabet → ISO Basic Latin alphabet – "ISO basic Latin alphabet" is a neologism. An alternative would be "ISO 646 Latin letters", but that would exclude the ordering of the letters, while "alphabet" in some senses includes an order. ISO 646 also includes an order of the elements. Lingufil (talk) 22:54, 11 April 2015 (UTC) Proposed target changed from ISO 646 Latin alphabet to ISO Basic Latin alphabet, Basic Latin is a proper name, see talk below. Lingufil (talk) 19:49, 12 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment: "Basic Latin" is the name of the corresponding Unicode block, per the Unicode block article, the Basic Latin (Unicode block) article, and the Latin script in Unicode article. (This was noted above previously on this Talk page by DanBishop.) It is also the name of the corresponding range that appears twice in the cited RFC 1815, so I don't think it's a Wikipedia neologism. Introducing a number into the title would also seem to make it harder to remember. In fact, capitalizing "basic" (since this is a proper noun for a specific alphabet) and/or removing "ISO" might even be appropriate. —BarrelProof (talk) 03:50, 12 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • BarrelProof: Basic Latin alphabet is too ambiguous. It could refer to the Classical, or to whatever someone thinks is basic. ISO Basic Latin alphabet could only refer to one of the standards 8859, 10646 - which is fine since they do agree with respect to the Basic letters. ISO 646 has the same, but does not use the word "Basic" yet. I think "ISO Basic Latin alphabet" would be a very good improvement, using a proper name instead of generic word "basic". Lingufil (talk) 15:00, 12 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
BarrelProof: I made a mistake, it seems Unicode was published before ISO 646.
  1. 1990 Unicode 1.0 published: Unicode Basic Latin alphabet - Unicode used "Basic Latin" for the block that contains the letters, and these are the only letters that is contains.
  2. 1991 ISO/IEC 646 published: ISO/IEC 646 Latin alphabet (the earliest ISO/IEC standard for this set of letters)
  3. ISO/IEC Basic Latin alphabet (avoid referring to one of ISO/IEC 646, ISO/IEC 8859-x, ISO/IEC 10646)
Lingufil (talk) 17:13, 12 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, according to the ISO/IEC 646 article, ISO 646 was first published in 1972. It is the older one – much older, in fact. The 1991 version is just a revision. Also, it was based on ASCII, which is even older (roughly 1963, according to that article). Unicode came along much much later. —BarrelProof (talk) 19:23, 12 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
BarrelProof: Thanks, information added: [1] and [2]. Lingufil (talk) 19:49, 12 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I was unable to deduce the parameters of "ISO 646". Many other article titles are written in code and these need parenthetic topic clarifications. Basic Latin (Unicode block) contains more characters than the 26 letters so "basic Latin" is made ambiguous. I am baffled as to how the Classical Latin alphabet has been presented as the ISO basic Latin alphabet. GregKaye 05:59, 12 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, there are more characters in the Basic Latin (Unicode block) than these, but the others are not alphabetic characters. This article is about the alphabet, which consists of the two subsets of the Basic Latin (Unicode block) that are identified in that article as the "Uppercase Latin Alphabet" and the "Lowercase Latin Alphabet". —BarrelProof (talk) 19:27, 12 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • GregKaye: @Classical Latin alphabet - If I follow the link I only get an alphabet containing 23 upper case characters. Lingufil (talk) 15:00, 12 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
      • Lingufil ty. I don't remember missing preschool and its basic alphabetic learning but perhaps it happened. I'm still baffled as to how it got to be defined as an "ISO basic Latin Alphabet" but perhaps this also happened. GregKaye 15:23, 12 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
        This article is not about the old Latin alphabet (a.k.a. the "Roman alphabet") that was used to write in ancient Latin. It is about the most basic set of letters used in modern Latin languages (a.k.a. the "Romance languages"). Actually, it's probably really about the basic English alphabet, but somehow these 26 × 2 letters came to be called the "Basic Latin alphabet" in computerese, and it seems to just correspond to the alphabetic subset of ASCII. I'm not really sure why this is a distinct article at all, as I don't see how it says anything that can't be (or isn't already) discussed in some of those other articles (e.g., English alphabet, ASCII, Basic Latin (Unicode block), ISO/IEC 646). If we really need to keep the article, I think "Basic Latin alphabet" (which is currently a dab page) or something like "Alphabetic characters in ASCII" or "ISO Basic Latin alphabet" is probably the right place for it. (We really ought to have someone with more expertise in this conversation, and I somehow wonder whether @Dicklyon: could help.) —BarrelProof (talk) 19:23, 12 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
        You mean because people have such of high opinion of my ideas on article titles? Thanks for making me laugh. Dicklyon (talk) 00:36, 13 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose as it is not clear how the given move reason supports capitalizing another word in the title. 73.222.28.191 (talk) 06:13, 15 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment What is not clear in "Basic Latin is a proper name"? Lingufil (talk) 15:57, 15 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose – It appears that essentially all books use lowercase "basic" for this (even after excluding wikipedia mirrors and e-study books, leaving not a whole lot). Dicklyon (talk) 16:18, 15 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • Commment The first link is an item from 2013, and obviously based on Wikipedia. "(c) 2013 Higher Education Press" - not a reliable source for the name. Lingufil (talk) 16:26, 15 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
      • Dicklyon - All I found are only books of cheap quality, published after the Wikipedia article has been named the way it is. Lingufil (talk) 16:31, 15 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
        • Yes, I believe you are right about that. That means the title is descriptive then, and that's there's no corresponding proper name, I presume. Dicklyon (talk) 00:10, 16 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
        • Dicklyon: Yes it is descriptive and it will stay descriptive. But the part "basic" is a neologism. "Basic Latin" on the other hand is not, it is the name of the Unicode block that contains that alphabet. Lingufil (talk) 05:57, 16 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose move leave it where it is as a descriptive title. I don't see how changing it to "ISO Basic Latin alphabet" would make it less of a neologism (indeed the caps would imply a name instead of a description). "ISO 646 Latin letters" would be meaningless to most people. The point that seems to be missed here is that with baud rates at around 1200 bits per second, the English speaking world was happy to have 8 bits or less for a character. The idea of using 16 bits or more to handle foreign character-sets would have been rejected because of slow modem speeds. So as the American telecommunications and computer industries dwarfed the rest of the First World put together, the 26 English letter alphabet became the basic alphabet for all languages as the internet came into existence. At one time British English operators had to choose whether their printers would print a £ instead of a # sign as the interfaces could only send character 0x23. -- PBS (talk) 22:33, 15 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment. PBS The proposal will leave it as descriptive title. It will only rectify "basic" - because that is a neologism. "Basic Latin" is justified, since that is the name of the Unicode block that contains that alphabet. Lingufil (talk) 05:57, 16 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
      I don't think this article is about the Unicode block. If it was, then Basic Latin (Unicode block) or something like that might work, though I'm still not convinced that "Basic Latin" is a proper name in that context, just because Unicode standards capitalize it. Dicklyon (talk) 15:14, 16 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    Dicklyon: It is about the alphabet contained in that Unicode block. Lingufil (talk) 01:49, 17 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Commment - Could it please be noted that the move requester is a particularly disruptive, single-minded sock who has consistently refactored articles, categories, etc. surrounding linguistics making unilateral/executive moves and changes without explaining himself/herself (until challenged), and making a dog's breakfast of said articles and categories. This is annoying and I OPPOSE it. --Iryna Harpy (talk) 23:05, 21 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

English multigraphs[edit]

Why aren't (ai), (ee), (ei), (ie), (oa), (oe), (oi), and (oo) listed? --Khajidha (talk) 12:42, 27 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Do they have digraph articles? AnonMoos (talk) 03:29, 27 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Cursive writing should probably be moved out of each letter's infobox[edit]

For each letter, the top of the infobox is a short gif of how to write this letter in cursive. Cursive writing is increasingly irrelevant these days, so rather than being prominent in the infobox, such a thing should be moved somewhere else on the pages. The same gif already exists in the "History" section for some letters such as R, and it could also perhaps exist in the "Other representations" section. Furthermore, the edits that moved the cursive gif into the infobox were made by a user that was blocked for being a sock puppet. Anyway, thoughts on this change? Aaronfranke (talk) 22:32, 15 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Probably few people will see your comment here. I'm not sure where the best place to discuss it would be -- maybe Template talk:Infobox grapheme? AnonMoos (talk) 00:36, 16 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Entry for Romanian[edit]

Romanian uses Latin script and has diacritics similar to other entries on the list. Should it be added to the list or is it different? -- Preceding unsigned comment added by Alexandrujuncu (talk o contribs) 05:04, 31 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Our Romanian alphabet article says that the letters with diacritics are regarded as distinct from the corresponding non-diacritic letters, so Romanian should not be included... AnonMoos (talk) 23:45, 21 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Does the ISO basic Latin alphabet allow diacritical marks?[edit]

It is not clear for me (and I am sure for some other people as well) whether letters with diacritical marks are still a part of the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

For example, you want to tell your colleague that he/she should not use any characters for file names other than A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9. It is assumed that characters such as the German "ä" are prohibited.

"Hanz, you should not use any characters other than numbers and the ISO basic Latin alphabet." - Whether such a phrase would be correct? -- Preceding unsigned comment added by 178.69.44.230 (talk) 03:59, 9 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

If they're not considered separate letters in the language involved, then the writing system can be subsumed under Basic Latin (though that's a very different thing from saying that the language can be written correctly with just the Basic Latin characters). AnonMoos (talk) 01:10, 10 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Having been on a 1990s Unix BBS which allowed only the ASCII characters, I can vouch for the system not handling 'international' characters (accented letters etc.) at all well... but workarounds were possible adding marks after the ASCII letters — a/, o^, u:, etc — and of course for umlauts the old telegraphic method was ü → ue, still very common. – .Raven  .talk 03:22, 30 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

multigraphs[edit]

What is the point of the "multigraphs" column of the table? What is the criterion for inclusion? English arguably has far more digraphs than the few listed. —Tamfang (talk) 01:12, 29 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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