Ar 12:17 -0700 1999-07-20, scr�obh A. Vine:
>Unaccented spellings of these and many many other words borrowed from other
>Latin alphabet based languages are perfectly correct in English.
"Fa�ade" can only be pronounced /fa'sa:d/. "Facade" could be pronounced
/fa'keid/. The latter is not to be preferred, any more than "nite" should
be preferred to "night".
>I just looked
>up those 3 examples in Webster's New Riverside for further confirmation
>and the
>unaccented versions are listed as proper spellings.
Of course "if it's in the dictionary it's gospel" in North America. (Not
being nasty here; it's a part of the culture arising in part from a deep
desire in the last century for immigrants to use "correct" English.
>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.
Naturalized borrowings are native words. "Fa�ade" and "na�ve" and "d�j� vu"
are English words, and one knows them to be naturalized as they are not
italicized in print. Thus these characters are part of standard English
orthography, O my belov�ds.
Stodgily,
-- Michael Everson * Everson Gunn Teoranta * http://www.indigo.ie/egt 15 Port Chaeimhghein �ochtarach; Baile �tha Cliath 2; �ire/Ireland Guth�n: +353 1 478 2597 ** Facsa: +353 1 478 2597 (by arrangement) 27 P�irc an Fh�ithlinn; Baile an Bh�thair; Co. �tha Cliath; �ire
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