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

--- Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...> wrote:
> 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|.
With my students it was usually their i's and l's
which became indistinguistable.  E merged with o.  G's
sometimes, but not frequently, looked like y's.  Oh
and I dare you to tell their a's from their u's or
their capital U's from their V's.

Adam

>
>
> -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

=====
Il prori ul pa&#38621;veju fi dji atexindu mutu madji
fached. -- Carrajena proverb