revision of ISO 3166

[Doug Ewell]

Michael Everson <everson at evertype dot com> wrote:

> The modern English alphabet is not limited to 26
> letters. Façade, naïve, and other words are all
> listed as the favoured spelling in many
> dictionaries.

Fair enough.  But there really needs to be an agreed-upon name for the
set of 26 letters from U+0041 through U+005A (plus lowercase
counterparts), which is so commonly encountered in computer
applications.

- "Latin script" isn't right; that comprises hundreds and hundreds of
letters.

- "Roman alphabet" isn't right; the Romans didn't use J or U or W.
(Please, don't anyone bother correcting this short list.  You get the
idea.)

- "English alphabet" isn't right either, as Michael points out.

So what is it?  The ASCII alphabet?  The Basic Latin alphabet?

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California
 http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/