Linguistic Strip-tease,
or,
Typographic Discrimination Among the many languages of the world, that are written using versions of the Latin alphabet, English is a happy exception. In principle, it is possible to write proper English without using any diacritics. In many other languages, however, there is a multitude of different accents and hooks, varying from frank German umlauts to Vietnamese double-accents. typographic discrimination . It is to be avoided. People have the right to see their name spelled properly. In some cases the meaning of a word, and usually the pronunciation, changes if diacritics are omitted. Often the diacritics affect the alphabetical ordering of a word (in Finnish and in Estonian, for instance, the rules for alphabetical ordering are rather complicated). Also, search engines may be sensitive to missing diacritics. Gorbachov Khrushchov Potyomkin Rublyov As for various special characters, it is more difficult to give a general guideline. It is recommendable to retain the Scandinavian and the French , for instance, but it is customary to replace the German with ss , it is to be written with two capitalized letters: . In some languages there are unique characters not in use in many others, like the Icelandic | |
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