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Re: Ignorant people & diacritics

From:Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
Date:Wednesday, December 1, 2004, 14:34
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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Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>