Re: Umlauts (was Re: Elves and Ill Bethisad)

On Thursday, October 23, 2003, at 10:25  PM, Adam Walker wrote:

> --- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
>>> FWIW laughing or grinding your teeth over
>>> all those URLs and mail addresses with omitted
>>> diacritics is a national pastime in Sweden.
>>
>> I'm afraid most of my fellow countrymen seem to
>> regard  diacritics as optional ornaments used by
>> foreigners for no good purpose.  My wife gallantly
>> tries to show generations of schoolkids that French
>> è and é have _different_ sounds - the accents are
>> not just fancy decoration to be ignored.
>>
>
> Oh, I'm quite familiar with that attitude.  My
> students in Taiwan felt the same way about dotting i's
> crossing t's distinguishing between e's and o's or
> between n's and h's.  It was all quite unnecessary
> foreigner foolishness.
>
> Adam
>
Actually, i now feel that the dots on lowercase I's and J's are
extraneous ornaments.  I learned this attitude from a Spanish teacher
of mine, in fact, and got used to it when using pens that didn't make
dots very well.  Now i only dot my |i|s and |j|s when my handwriting is
so bad that they can be confused with other letters - usually |e| for
|i| and |g| for |j|.


-Stephen (Steg)
  "If you do not like the image in the mirror
   do not break the mirror, break your face"
      ~ Old Persian proverb, quoted re Afghanistan
        by Barnett Rubin and Ahmed Rashid

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