At 14:57 -0700 2004-07-08, Mike Ayers wrote:
When transcribing to English, however, removal of the caron (macron? Apologies, but I tend to forget the names of most accents) would be most acceptable (for American English, at least).
NOT in good typography, ever.
It gave me some insight into the European view of diacritics, which is very different from mine. For instance, it seems that diacritics have similar effects on vowels, and that those vowels have similar sounds both before and after modification, across most (all?) European languages - am I reading correctly here?
Not really. Diacritics may affect the quantity of a vowel, the quality of a vowel, or simply indicate something about a word's history.
I think it's stupid (in general) to argue for stripping a letter of diacritics. If a reader is ignorant of their meaning, that can be cured. But if they are meaningful, stripping them is just misspelling the words they belong to. Why would anyone want to do that?
--
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
