> 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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_orthography

This depends on your definition of informal terms like "letter", "character" etc.

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).

A better example would probably be "ij" in Dutch. That's definitely considered a single letter, as words starting with ij in Dutch are capitalised IJ. Though there are glyphs for IJ /ij already in unicode.

"Ij" is also one sounds represented bij two letters, and I think capitalizing just the 'I' is pretty standard. As a Dutch person myself, I didn't even know that there's a glyph for it!

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).

Spelling it "dike" helps keep people's minds on the right thing. :)

If you spell it "dijk" it's even less racy, because it's no longer a four-letter word.

Well shit. Guess I'll have to clean out my mind with some soap...

As a Dutch person myself, capitalizing just the I and not the J hurts my eyes. Ijsselmeer or IJsselmeer?

Interesting. I never really gave it much thought, but Ij actually bothers me so much that I usually try to avoid using it at the beginning of a sentence, and I cringe when I need to capitalize because it's a place (like Ijsselmeer).

Just did some googling. Turns out that unlike the other combinations, capitalizing both letters is mandatory for 'IJ'. TIL...

Same as OE/Πin French, then.

Nobody has that as a letter on the keyboard here though, so it doesn't matter. Normally typed as a digraph. Would be nice if we just switched over to using y at this point. Makes me wonder, is the use of diacritics reducing since ascii keyboards became the norm ?

Afrikaans did this. We use "y" instead of "ij".

"ij" is sometimes considered a single letter, but certainly not always. Quoting Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph)):

"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)

I don't know that that's correct. That there exists a ligature character doesn't mean the ligature is a character of the language.

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

Based on my experience learning Czech (not native at all, just interested):

- 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)

A a native Czech speaker, i never really understood what it means that 'ch' is one letter in Czech. It is clearly two graphemes representing one phoneme, so one could think it is a digraph, but it has some special properties like being one element in collating order. I think people just started to call it one letter to have one-letter-one-sound property.

At first I though they simply mean the letter "č" but no, it turns out that "ch" (and also "dz") is a digraph with a separate place in Czech and Slovak alphabets.

Yeah, but in Czech it's "č".

No. Č is something else, ch is a digraph that's pronounced differently. Take a look at Czech and Slovak alphabets specifically:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_orthography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovak_orthography

I'm Polish and I have just tangential knowledge of Czech language. Sorry for confusion.