this is a terrific article, thanks! I had no idea there was a for-real Queen Of Outer Space, for a few years, anyway.
It is complicated: Ll (only the first “L” is capitalized, if you have a font without serifs it looks like a capital “i”, but is a lower case “L”. Hypercorrection leads some to wrongly capitalize ⟨ll⟩ as a single letter, as with the Dutch [IJ], for example LLosa instead of Llosa. In handwriting, ⟨Ll⟩ is written as a ligature of two ⟨l⟩s, with distinct uppercase and lowercase forms.) is a digraph, (or digram), that is: a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme (distinct sound), or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined.
Some digraphs represent phonemes that cannot be represented with a single character in the writing system of a language, like ⟨ch⟩ in Spanish chico and ocho. Or ⟨ll⟩, as the example we are discussing.
The letter ⟨Ll⟩ was collated (sorted alphabetically, TIL) after ⟨l⟩ as a separate entry from 1803 until April 1994 when the X Congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies adopted standard Latin alphabet collation rules. Since then, the digraph ⟨ll⟩ has been considered a sequence of two characters.
A similar situation occurred with the Spanish-language digraph ch.
In the Spanish wikipedia they write
that Ll used to be the fourteenth letter and the eleventh consonant in the Spanish alphabet, but this is not longer the case. Now it is collated within the entries for the letter L. So llama comes after libro, but before loco. Until 2010 llama came after all the words with L + vocal (the last one was probably luz: light).
Ch was considered the fourth letter and the third consonant until 2010, now it is digraph too in Spanish and gets sorted between Ca and Ce (I can’t think of any word that starts with Cd, so I skip that).
Wiki says that it is still a separate letter in the Mixtec, Quechua, Guaraní, Chamorro, Chabacano and Choctaw alphabets. But no longer in Spanish.
I ignore what happened between 1994 (when the Assotiation of Spanish Academies decided to no longer count them as individual letters expressed by a digraph) and 2010, when the Spanish Academy made that stance official, if I understand the wikientries correctly. But now the status is clear and settled. Until something changes again.
That made me laugh!
Especially if they nur Bahnhof verstehen.
English has several digraphs for sounds that can’t be represented by single letters, like ch, th, and sh. We also have qu, which sounds the same as kw, but q can (almost) never appear by itself. When alphabetizing and such, though, they’re universally considered two separate letters: Words starting with “th” would be after words starting with “tg” (if there are any) and before “ti”.
On the other hand, though, names starting with “Mc” used to be alphabetized after all of the “M” names. I think that this was to allow for variations in spelling, where the same name could sometimes start with “Mc” and sometimes with “Mac”.
I read somewhere that the only past participle in Standard American English that ended in t anymore is “dreamt” and that any other t-ended usages are non-standard holdovers from Old English.
Leapt leaps to mind.
What about spent?
I believe a relevant difference between English and Spanish (and French) ist that there is no official state Academy of the English Language. In Spanish there is, several, in fact, when you include the South American countries*. So in Spanish and French there is an authority that can dictate what the right thing to do is concerning the use of laguage and letters, while dictionary publishers in English can try to apply common sense.
*Which Spain graciously agreed to do after considering them evidently inferior in their use of Spanish for centuries, but that is another matter.
That’s something I’ve thought about after I learned more about language. Why would Old English constructions be non-standard? Archaic, sure … but not standard? That and we should being back the thorn but that’s a different thread.
And, in some older books, with “M’ “
This is really interesting. In Welsh, where Ll and Ch are likewise separate letters and alphabetized as such, LL is occasionally and correctly capitalized (as in LLinos or more usually Llinos) but Ch isn’t.
Cof (memory)
Chi (you)
Lol (nonsense)
Lli (flood)
is a correctly alphabetized list.
The blinking light at the top of the Capitol Records Tower in Hollywood has been blinking a single word in Morse Code since 1956. That word is “Hollywood”.
Great! Poke around to see if others catch your eye. There are *exhausted sigh* 176 of them.
Don’t hide your Mapcase under a bushel: link to them any time
I think “used to” is operative. Modern alphabetizing algorithms use strict order, so “Mac” appears between “Mab” and “Mad” and “Mc” between “Mas” and “Mea”. That meant havoc for libraries at the time, because their card catalog order no longer matched their computer order.
I’m fighting with Excel now because I put “All in the Family” before “Allen” since I believe the space should appear before any letter and it does not. The Chicago Manual dubs my approach word-by-word and Excel’s approach letter-by-letter. It approves of both and says there are advocates and detractors on both sides. But you can’t argue with an algorithm; the only cure is to go in and hand change what you don’t like.
Right. Give my bushel a peck.
- No President lived in the White House from late 1948 until early 1952. It was discovered that it was literally falling apart, and had to be completely gutted - leaving only the exterior walls standing.
(the President and family lived in Blair House - across the street).
- The White House New Year’s Reception was an annual public reception held at the White House every New Year’s Day from 1801 to 1932. Attendees were able to go inside the White House to greet and shake the hand of the president of the United States and often the hand of the first lady of the United States. The president was expected to shake each person’s hand. The first lady would shake hands as well, but she was able to leave early if she grew tired.[3][4][5][6]
The reception was attended by members of the general public as well as diplomats, members of the cabinet, senators, congressmen, government officials, and members of the military. In the last few decades of its occurrence, the crowds were in the thousands, with a line of sometimes over 6,000 people, several blocks long.
The 1994 decision concerned collation exclusively. They remained part of the alphabet until 2010. It’s in the ll Spanish Wikipedia article you linked to.
I remember discussing the 2010 decision with people at the time and feeling a little exasperated (I’m easily exasperated) trying to explain that spelling will remain unchanged.
Never on a first date!
Should have read it more carefully, but what you say makes sense. I only read until I could prove my point.
Does that mean that when you spell the word churro you still say “che, u, doble erre, o” or do you say “ce, hache, u, erre, erre, o”? The spelling in writing does obviously not change (I understand your exasperation), but what do people say when they dictate the spelling aloud, perhaps of their name?
Double r, btw, is also a digraph but was never a separate independent letter in the Spanish alphabet, perhaps because it is never at the beginning of a word, but wikipedia (in Spanish) says it is a letter in Guaraní and Albanian.
IME, in the pre-computer days, all “Mac” and “Mc” names were alphabetized as though they were spelled “Mac”.
Here’s the Wikipedia entry.