From: Mark Davis (mark.davis@jtcsv.com)
Date: Thu Jul 08 2004 - 19:43:22 CDT
> Why would anyone want to do that?
I tend to be with you on this, that it does little harm to retain accents.
However, most major periodic popular publications have this practice; for
example The Economist keeps accents for French, German, Spanish, Italian
words and names but discards others (as I recall).
In one sense, the using "Dvorak" in English for "Dvořák" is little different
than using "Cologne" in English for "Köln". Both are transcriptions into a
form that has become more or less customary.
Mark
----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Everson" <everson@evertype.com>
To: <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 08, 2004 15:13
Subject: RE: Looking for transcription or transliteration standards latin-
>arabic
> 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
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Jul 08 2004 - 19:43:58 CDT