> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On
> Behalf Of Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin
> Sent: Tuesday, July 06, 2004 9:04 PM
> On 2004.07.07, 00:49, Mike Ayers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > Are you implying that, had printers throughout the centuries put the
> > effort into faithfully reproducing every obscure symbol
>
> I spell my own name with some of those obscure symbols, thank you.
Yep. Hope you don't mind my inability to pronounce it. However, grave (and acute) accents hardly rate as obscure, so I could pronounce through them and get passably close. Even here in the cultural boondocks we know that.
> Obscure indeed -- that's the last thing I'd expect in a list such as
> this! Is internationalization is serious issue, or just a toy to kill
> off idle time?
Oh, calm down. We were originally talking about Vietnamese diacritics, many of which definitely qualify as obscure, the rest being obscure uses of more familiar diacritics. Just because you don't like the kind of internationalization I mentioned does not mean it shouldn't be discussed.
> > from every foreign language, that the modern American would accept
> > words with arbitrary diacritics?
>
> "Foreign"? "American"? I obviously misunderstood the whole purpose of
> these discussions, then. Bye bye -- will back as soon as I get my
> Green Card, señor! >;-)
Are you just trying to kick up dirt here, or were you genuinely unaware that National Geographic is an American publication? I specified "American", as opposed to "English speaking" in this case for that reason, also because the British are known to be more familiar with, and therefore tolerant of, various diacritics. I doubt, however, that this would have any bearing on Vietnamese, which, while it uses familiar looking diacritics, uses them in very unfamiliar (to Europeans in general, as best I understand it) ways.
Now, in a last desperate hope to address the issue I raised: does the practice of stripping diacritics have a name?
Thanks,
/|/|ike
