Re: Ignorant people & diacritics

On Wed, 1 Dec 2004 14:17:27 +0100, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
> Now, would it have been better to write "Creme Fraiche" instead?
IMO yes.

Even better would be to use a language-specific replacement, e.g.
"Heizoelrueckstossabdaempfung" for German rather than
"Heizolruckstosabdampfung", where ö -> oe rather than o, and similarly
for other umlauted vowels -- though AFAIK e.g. Swedish tends to do ä,
ö -> a, o rather than -> ae, oe. But even a "strip all diacritics"
method is better, in my eyes, than inserting wrong ones. (An example
of wrong diacritics sometimes seen in English and German is French
feminines ending in -eé, e.g. "matineé".)

> I think so, because the above not only shows lacking knowledge (which
> would be ok), but some amount if ignorance and the lack of will to
> look it up despite the awareness of a 'peculiarity'.
I had a co-worker with last name François once whose name was
misspelled in various ways including (IIRC) "Frañcois" and "Francôis"
by a well-meaning but clueless co-worker who knew that there was "some
weird squiggle" in his name but not exactly what or where.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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