> On Tuesday, July 20, 1999 8:17 PM A. Vine wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 20 Jul 1999 08:28:17 -0700 (PDT), Michael Everson wrote:
> >
> > >
> > >As an educated native speaker of English I would like to inform you
that
> > >even English, correctly spelled, requires characters other than the
letters
> > >A-Z, as in naturalized words such as façade, café, vicuña, and so on.
> >
>
> Unaccented spellings of these and many many other words borrowed from
other
> Latin alphabet based languages are perfectly correct in English. I just
looked
> up those 3 examples in Webster's New Riverside for further confirmation
and the
> unaccented versions are listed as proper spellings.
>
As a slightly educated native speaker of English I would like to re-iterate
what Micheal siad about accented characters. In the Oxford Advanced
Learner's Dictionary of Current English the three words given only appear
with accents. They may appear in Webster's (i.e. American English) without
but I have always been taught that they should have the accents.
> English speakers do not have accents as part of their native alphabet. We
adapt
> other language spellings as necessary - for Latin character based
languages,
> this means dropping the accents/diacritics, for other character sets this
means
> transliteration.
>
I know from my experience of living and being educated in England but
working for a number of American companies that the trend is towards
dropping accents as they are not readily available on the available
keyboards. In the past accented characters were used in handwritten and
printed material as any family historian would agree.
> Of course, the accented versions are perfectly correct as well.
>
Perhaps we should rather say: Unaccented versions are perfectly correct as
well.
Martin JD Green
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