The passing of the diphthong, mourned by Ken Faulkner (Letters, January 5), is due in part to the change in editorial style and to the change to electronic photosetting of type.
In the days of hot-metal typesetting, the Linotype machine, in addition to the main magazines of ordinary characters, had a side case containing diphthongs, accented foreign letters and other matrix not used in the ordinary text.
These would be inserted by hand in the matrix assembler.
-R W Carden, Brighton
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