Timeline for Why does English omit diacritics on foreign names?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
35 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 4, 2022 at 23:04 | comment | added | Stuart F | As David says, it is simply incorrect to say that English speakers are lazy, or at least lazier than anyone else. See how many non-Spanish diacritics you find in a Spanish newspaper, or look at what Chinese or Japanese do with European words and names. | |
| May 4, 2022 at 18:47 | answer | added | user452441 | timeline score: 1 | |
| Sep 4, 2019 at 12:55 | comment | added | David | We're no worse than anyone else. In certain respects better. We English refer to the (historic) French king as Louis, whereas the Germans call him Ludwig and refer to Shakespeare's play as Heinrich V. And East Europeans tend to add endings to English names to give them a gender that corresponds to the sex of the individual. (I enjoyed that last one.) And the French talk about an Austrian composer called Mozar. etc. etc. | |
| Sep 4, 2019 at 10:55 | review | Close votes | |||
| Sep 10, 2019 at 3:05 | |||||
| Nov 7, 2018 at 3:57 | comment | added | Hot Licks | @Mitch - Or Chinese? | |
| Nov 7, 2018 at 2:09 | answer | added | jsw29 | timeline score: 5 | |
| Nov 6, 2018 at 20:56 | comment | added | Mitch | Why don't literate English write Japanese using Japanese characters? How dare the English be so provincial! | |
| Nov 6, 2018 at 2:40 | answer | added | bballdave025 | timeline score: 15 | |
| Nov 15, 2016 at 17:45 | comment | added | Kate Bunting | There used to be a café in my home town calling itself the Continental Food Bar. This was written with a diaeresis (two dots) over every 'o' and 'a', presumably to give the phrase a 'foreign' appearance, but with no ides of changing the pronunciation. I never went in there, but I always mentally pronounced it with the vowel sounds appropriately modified! | |
| Dec 17, 2015 at 15:22 | answer | added | user1113568 | timeline score: 7 | |
| Dec 8, 2015 at 21:21 | comment | added | Andreas Blass | I've encountered computer programs (specifically a word processor and an email program) that allowed me to put an acute accent on an e but not on an n, and that allowed me to put a cedilla under a c but not under an s or a t. So, as far as the designers of these programs are concerned, French is OK, but Polish and Romanian aren't. I suppose that, if I were less lazy, I could have found solutions to these, but I really did try in the case of Romanian. (And yes, I'm aware that the thing I want in Romanian isn't technically a cedilla, but, being lazy, I consider it close enough.) | |
| Jan 30, 2015 at 16:09 | answer | added | anemone | timeline score: 5 | |
| Jan 30, 2015 at 7:04 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/#!/StackEnglish/status/561057450477240321 | ||
| Jan 30, 2015 at 2:25 | comment | added | Hot Licks | Duh!! They're not on the keyboard. | |
| Jan 30, 2015 at 1:53 | answer | added | hunterhogan | timeline score: 4 | |
| Jan 29, 2015 at 21:36 | comment | added | SrJoven | @TallArnie But you must understand that English speaking countries have no clue about the difference between l and ł or a and ą. To other countries, the characters in question simply do not exist in the language. For fun, check out habanero versus habañero (versus jalapeño). | |
| Jan 29, 2015 at 20:42 | comment | added | Dan | Are speakers of other languages any different ? | |
| Jan 29, 2015 at 18:57 | comment | added | ScotM | @tchrist you missed the most important descriptors: indifference & disdain. We don't care how other languages spell their words, and we think it is strange if they expect us to :-) | |
| Jan 29, 2015 at 17:16 | comment | added | John Lawler | The British policy about accents and foreign words is that British pronunciation and spelling is to be preferred in every case. Including speaking French fluently with a strong English accent, which irritates the hell out of the French, and has been policy for centuries because of that. The British royal family has spoken French since the Norman conquest, for instance, no matter what Shakespeare said in Henry V. | |
| Jan 29, 2015 at 16:33 | answer | added | SrJoven | timeline score: 5 | |
| Jan 29, 2015 at 16:00 | comment | added | TallArnie | @tchrist: In reference to your very first comment, I wouldn't think that institutions like the BBC would omit diacritics out of 'laziness, impatience, [or] ignorance'. They deliberately choose to ignore these diacritics, and I wonder why that is. It may not matter to the average Joe, but it does matter to people like myself who have a grasp of those languages. To me, spelling Lech Wałęsa as Lech Walesa is akin to a spelling mistake. I recently read an English book on Polish family life, and the omission of diacritics really annoyed me (golabki just don't taste the same as gołąbki ;-)) | |
| Jan 29, 2015 at 14:19 | history | edited | tchrist♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Improved formatting.
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| Jan 29, 2015 at 14:17 | history | edited | TallArnie | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 16 characters in body
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| Jan 29, 2015 at 14:16 | comment | added | TallArnie | @JanusBahsJacquet: I stand corrected that using foreign diacritics is common in The Netherlands: neither nu.nl as nos.nl uses them. They seem to use the accents that are common to the Dutch language though (like the grave and acute accent). So it looks like the Dutch are not much better than the Brits ;-) | |
| Jan 29, 2015 at 14:11 | history | edited | tchrist♦ |
edited tags; edited tags
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| Jan 29, 2015 at 14:03 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | @JanusBahsJacquet I find that we are more apt to do a fairly good job at Western European languages, but that we fall down on languages coming from anywhere east of there—the Slavic languages being notable problems for us and Vietnamese unthinkable. I try to always write Karel Čapek for the famed inventor of the robot, and Ceaușescu and Mohorovičić when I must. But most people aren’t able to follow Bringhurst’s advice even writing OED words. As an aside, I kinda wish the title of this posting had been «Ẅɦƴ ðøñť ɏṏᶙ Эŋᵹɭıſɦɝȥ ẘȑịƭӭ ƃĕȶȶǝʁ‽» :) | |
| Jan 29, 2015 at 13:46 | answer | added | Dan | timeline score: 4 | |
| Jan 29, 2015 at 13:43 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | Also, the Dutch do not “always use these diacritics when possible”. For example, the Dutch sports site sportuitslagen.org writes Tien Minh NGUYEN rather than Nguyễn Tiến Minh, and even De Telegraaf writes Lech Walesa rather than Lech Wałęsa. | |
| Jan 29, 2015 at 13:31 | comment | added | Tim Lymington | Please don't answer in comments. | |
| Jan 29, 2015 at 13:29 | comment | added | David Garner | tchrist, agreed. Most of us Brits grew up with a language that used no diacritics, and except when handwriting, had no way of forming them: our old typewriters, and earlier computers, had no way of composing accented letters. Microsoft and Apple have partially rectified this, but it's still a messy business writing foreign text in an English-language environment. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try! | |
| Jan 29, 2015 at 13:28 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | The letters á, š, ø, ł, ó, and ź are not part of the English alphabet. There’s no rule against using them in foreign words (I personally always write złoty rather than zloty, for example), but there’s also no particular reason to use them in an English setting. I don’t really see how the script using in the source language is particularly relevant—you always have the option of including non-standard letters or not when writing in English. (Note: if you’re talking Norwegian, the letter ø doesn’t have any diacritics. It’s a simple, uncompounded letter like i or f.) | |
| Jan 29, 2015 at 13:24 | comment | added | Dan Bron | Probably the same reason we spell it "Germany" instead of "Deutschland"; when foreign words are imported, they are often transformed, sometimes extensively. In the particular case of diacritics, the alphabet used in English lacks these (except in some old-fashioned and increasingly rare cases), to the extent that it's often not even obvious how to type such letters, outside of professional typesetting contexts. Where those contexts do prevail (e.g. established news media), often a style guide will determine whether and where to use inflected letters in foreign names and words. | |
| Jan 29, 2015 at 13:22 | review | First posts | |||
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| Jan 29, 2015 at 13:21 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | Laziness, impatience, and ignorance. Sorry, but that's the reason. | |
| Jan 29, 2015 at 13:19 | history | asked | TallArnie | CC BY-SA 3.0 |