[d1sxeyes]

In contrast, the Hungarian "cs", "dz", "dzs", "gy", "ny", "sz", "ty", and "zs" all remain distinct, as do their accented vowels. Polish is hybrid, considering digraphs as being 'composed' of single letters (i.e. 'sz' = 's+z'), rather than being distinct, but the accented characters are considered distinct from their unaccented cousins.

This problem has primarily come about because the Catholic church enforced the latin alphabet on languages where a different alphabet might have been more appropriate. Spanish, although more closely related to Latin, still has a few sounds which there's not a good latin character for. There's no (particular) reason (as far as I'm aware) that 'ch' and 'll' became diagraphs, while ñ acquired an accent.

Why should traditions change just because it's a bit more difficult to do things the 'old way'? why do we still bother with capital letters at the beginning of sentences? or speling things with two leters when one wil do, or riting silent leters wen you cant tell the difrens? & i dont think we need apostrofees n e more.

[cryptonector]

Indeed, there's no reason for 'ch' and 'll' to have been distinct digraphs in Spanish and ñ not to have been 'gn' as in other Romance languages. I'm not familiar with the whys of that.

I didn't know that Hungarian had a similar issue.

> Why should traditions change just because it's a bit more difficult to do things the 'old way'? why do we still bother with capital letters at the beginning of sentences? or speling things with two leters when one wil do, or riting silent leters wen you cant tell the difrens? & i dont think we need apostrofees n e more.

I distinguish typographic and orthographic rules. The non-breaking, thin space before punctuation rule is typographic and outdated (i.e., motivated by outdated typographic technology).

I do want some orthographic rules reformed too, but I'm more interested in the ones that are just hard. In particular I'm interested in collation reform because we do often have to collate multi-language text items but with one collation -this is especially true in databases- so having collations for Latin-script-using languages be similar is rather useful. This is also true given that I'm not going to be switching locales when I switch languages -- I speak, read, and write multiple languages, but I never ever change locales.