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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of the more extreme case of Spain changing the treatment of <ll> due to limitations of PCs in the 1990s.

Our tools should adapt to the needs of humans, not the other way around!

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The digraphs ch (named che), ll (named elle or doble ele) have traditionally also been treated as letters of the alphabet, since 1803. However, in 1994, the tenth congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies agreed to alphabetize ch and ll as ordinary pairs of letters in the dictionary by request of UNESCO and other international organizations, while keeping them as distinct letters for the alphabet and other purposes. In 2010 the Spanish Language Academies agreed that these two digraphs were not separate letters. Similarly, rr (named erre or ere) has sometimes been considered a separate letter but is no longer.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Spanish_alphabet

https://web.archive.org/web/20150426001803/https://www.nytim...

The other day (in 2024!!) , I got a message saying my password needed to include a special character, with a helpful list of special characters that were forbidden.

Hmm... However, language is itself also a tool. There are cases where adapting language to another tool is easier than the other way around.

Sure, but the computer is a tool designed to be malleable and adapt to the human. This kind of grunt work (adapting to humans' models of collation) is exactly the kind of task that should be handed off to machines.

Do you have pointers to this? As a Spaniard I recall that even though I was originally told the spanish alphabet treated the LL as its own letter, it always felt quite inconsistent. And I always assumed it’s removal was more about simplifying things than having to do with computers

There is a comment from "adolph" parallel to yours with footnotes. But I remember the event well (though it was 30 years ago) as the difficulty for programmers was given as the justification for the law (this was a change in collation).

This particularly irked me as unicode was a few years old at this point, and while not really adopted yet, was clearly the future.

Not really a problem but some buses and digital displays where I live in Austria skip umlauts and just use the 26 letter spelling ae rather than ä or strasse rather than Straße.

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