Is "ch" really considered one _character_ in Czech and Slovak? I'm Polish and we do have "ch" and consider it one ... sound... represented by two letters? I mean... if you asked anyone to count letters/characters in a word, they would count "ch" as two. So I wonder if that's different in Slovakia or Chech Republic, or is just my definition of "character" wrong.
According to wikipedia, "Ch" is a character of the Czech alphabet in the sense that it impacts alphabetical ordering ("Ch" sorts between H and I), in the same way Ł or Ę are apparently characters from the Polish alphabet distinct from L and E respectively (wikipedia mentions that "być comes after bycie").
That is unlike, say, french where É and E are the same character alphabetically.
The typographic term for combinations like this is "digraph". (Wikipedia's definition: "A digraph [...] is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme [...] or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined".)
Whether digraphs have separate keys on a keyboard, are treated as distinct for the purposes of alphabetisation, whether speakers of the language think of them as separate "letters" when spelling out a word and so on, are all separate issues and varies between languages (or, more precisely, between the conventions for writing a certain language).
We also have "ei", which sounds the same and was invented to annoy people learning Dutch. Then there's "oe", "eu", "ui". And just to fuck even more with people learning the language, we have "au" and "ou" which also sound the same. Oh, and "ch" and "g".
Hans Brinker, the inventor of the Dutch language, famously would toss a florijn to decide between using ei/ij and au/ou, as he was not fond of foreigners. He's mostly known for saving our country though when he plugged a hole in a dyke with his finger (yes, I know what you're thinking, and no, we do not appreciate your dirty minds making light of this heroic act).
Just did some googling. Turns out that unlike the other combinations, capitalizing both letters is mandatory for 'IJ'. TIL...
It could, mind, I don't know dutch. But in french "œ" (which has a ligatured character as you can see) is canonically equivalent to "oe". It is not a separate letter of the alphabet even though:
* many words should not be written with the ligatured form
* many words should be written with the ligatured form
* it has a different pronunciation than the base form
"IJ (lowercase ij; Dutch pronunciation: [ɛi]) is a digraph of the letters i and j. Occurring in the Dutch language, it is sometimes considered a ligature, or a letter in itself. In most fonts that have a separate character for ij, the two composing parts are not connected but are separate glyphs, which are sometimes slightly kerned."
(and equivalent in the Dutch Wikipedia article)
- it's typically listed as a separate letter when writing out the alphabet
- but in practice it's typed out as "c h" and not as a single character
- it occupies its own place in Czech standard alphabetical order, my English-Czech dictionary has all the "ch" words after "h" (so interestingly in order to do a proper sort programmatically you need to possibly look 2 characters ahead)