[Bug: 21.5-b21] XEmacs mistakes Swiss German for Chinese

[Aidan Kehoe]

 Ar an seachtú lá de mí Bealtaine, scríobh Kilian A. Foth: 

 > Apparently XEmacs assumes that it can't be German if there is no ß, so
 > perphaps it's Chinese. I propose that whatever mechanism does this
 > analysis (apparently in C somewhere?) should not be conditioned on ß
 > at all, since it is not reliably present, and in fact after the latest
 > spelling reform is much less common even in standard German.

I did some contract office-monkey work at the European Patent Office, where
the three working languages are English, German and French, and where the
keyboard layout is Swiss, the better to support all three. While I was
there, there were posters up for a presentation on the implementation of the
Rechtschreibreform, the new German orthography. The most noticeable
distinction between the reformed orthography and the old one is that daß is
now spelled dass (as it always has been in Switzerland), and in general, as
you say, ß is now less common. How to type it, however, did come up, and I
asked a well-qualified, literate, Bavarian colleague, who’d been there for
five years already. He didn’t know, he had always typed ss.

So, yes, agreed, whether ß is there or not should not be as important as it
is now.

-- 
Aidan Kehoe, http://www.parhasard.net/