You will need a Unicode font with Central-European an IPA characters to read my examples.
Mike Ayers wrote:
> Perhaps it is. But then it's partly due to the "lazy" tradition.
Are you implying that, had printers throughout the centuries put the effort into faithfully reproducing every obscure symbol from every foreign language, that the modern American would accept words with arbitrary diacritics?
I do not pretend to know, but "accept" is probably not the best word to use in this context, after all it's not about the spelling of English words. And not every tradition needs to be hundreds of years old.
> I don't think it's a problem with any given diacritical. Its rather > an indistinct horror of diacriticals in general in speakers of a > language without any diacriticals at all, like English. E.g. > Hungarian uses three diacriticals and Hungarian speakers make no > big deal of just ignoring the "meaningless" caron in Czech or > the grave > and the cedilla in Roumanian names. > On the other hand, I must admit, that we also can be quite brutal > to diacriticals in some newspapers or when it comes to a language > like Vietnamese...
In other words, you're pretty comfortable with your own diacritics. You make my point for me.
"Our own" are the acute (to show vowel length), the diaeresis (to show timbre, like in German) and the doubleacute (=a "stretched diaeresis" actually, to show both timbre and length at the same time). The caron or the cedilla are just as foreign for us as e.g. the odd "question marks" above Vietnamese vowels, even if they may be less unusual. And the case of the newpapers I'm talking about may be just classic examples of lazy typography, at least the silly spelling mistakes and other inaccuracies they allow themselves point in that direction. In books by any serious publisher, it would definitely be completely unacceptable to write e.g. HaÅek's name (a famous Czech satyrist) as Hasek.
Once we got into this debate, let me quote an example where distinguishing between diacritics as "familiar" and "unfamiliar" may lead to undesirable results. Imagine, someone writes an article about a person named TÃrÅcsik [tÃrÃËÊik] (we accidentally have an actress by that surname). Suppose the journalist thinks it reasonable to retain the "familiar" diaeresis, because it is found in German and many other well-known orthographies. But what should be the fate of the doubleacute (which is actually nothing but a special kind of diaeresis, as I mentioned above)? As an "unfamiliar" diacritic, it should be discarded if the principle is applied mechanically. This would result in the form "TÃrocsik" [tÃroÊik]; however, as you may see from the phonetic transcription, this is not simply incomplete information in such a context, but explicit misinformation. The less cruel approach would be to replace the "special diaeresis" with the "normal" one and write "TÃrÃcsik" [tÃrÃÊik]. This is undoubtedly the least unacceptable of the "diacritic-folded" variants mathematically possible, but it is neither a proper English transcription because of the diaereses and the unusual value of the consonant cluster "cs", nor correct Hungarian because of "denying" the long vowel, so what is it after all?
There may not be an easy way to solve sucht situations, so that everybody would be pleased, but at least thinking about them does no harm. Sorry for being so long, perhaps someone finds my data interesting.
Regards,
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