> 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 "DvoÅÃk" is little different than using "Cologne" in English for "KÃln". Both are transcriptions into a form that has become more or less customary. âMark ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Everson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 > >
