Losing The Accent 3

[Dimandja]

You write manana, I write mañana.

English lacks accents, but borrows heavily from accented languages. Too often, English publications such as newspapers will drop the accents and write things like "Academie Francaise" (accent aigu and cedille are missing). My keyboard suffers from English limitations

From a hasty instant message to a scholarly work, when is it Ok to lose those pesky foreign accents?

 

[PWD]

When you say "English publications", do you really mean 'American' publications?

Des.

 

[sleipnir214]

Dimandja:

I think you've already answered your question.

In a hasty instant message, I don't think that anyone who is not on the voting board of the [now let's see if I can do this] Acad[é]mie Fran[ç]aise [I think that's right] will care that you've left off the acute and cedilla marks.

In a scholarly work, the accent marks will be necessary.

It's the in-between stuff that is problematic. In this case, keep in mind your audience. For example, if your audience is an person whose primary language is English, I don't think the marks are necessary.

Also, there is the problem of actually representing them. In Tek-Tips, one must resort to "[ignore]Acad[é]mie Fran[ç]aise"[/ignore] to even get those marks there. Most readers in Tek-Tips, I think, will be forgiving of my not taking the time to enter all that extra text.


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TANSTAAFL!!

 

[CajunCenturion]

I wonder how you're defining publication. Do you consider a hasty instant message as a publication, and not all scholorly works are published. How does "publishing a web page" fit in? In my mind, publishing a web page is not quite the same as publishing a book, or magazine article.

Personally, I would like to see the accents remain in all published works, such as a newspaper, and I would certainly hope that all academic institutions insist on correctness.

I know I haven't offered an answer to the question, but then, there are so many gray areas that I'm not really sure where to draw the line.

Good Luck
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[ericbrunson]

In my limited experience on spanish speaking forums I find that it is de rigeur to substitute the ~ for the n, i.e. ma~ana.

Just my 2c. ;-)

 

[ESquared]

It would be easier if more applications were set up to enter these characters.

For those who don't know, MS Word and Yahoo! Messenger allow you to enter accent marks as follows:

Type Ctrl plus the key which represents the accent mark you wish. No character will appear. Then, type the letter you want to use with it.

Accent - key
acute - single quote '
grave - reverse single quote ` (on tilde key)
tilde - tilde ~
umlaut - colon :
cedilla - comma ,
circumflex - caret ^

So for example, to type Ñ in these programs, you would first type Ctrl Shift ~ and let go, then type Shift N.

I often find it faster to switch to one of these and copy and paste the character back into some other application, rather than use TGML or some other method. I actually did that to put in the Ñ.

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A sacrifice is harder when no one knows you've made it.

 

[Dimandja]

Comme ça? Thanks E2! Now how do you square things?

 

[lgarner]

Less convenient, but workable, is the alt-number sequence.

Adiós.

 

[ESquared]

As lgarner says, for those you use often you can memorize the ASCII code.

Hold down Alt and type, on the numeric keypad (the number keys above the letters won't work), the number for the symbol you want, then let go of Alt. Here are the few I have memorized because of frequent use:

0149 • bullet
0151 — em dash
0153 ™ trademark symbol
0178 ² superscript 2
0179 ³ superscript 3
0239 ï umlaut i used to make a butterfly }ï{

Note that the zero in front is required. Without the zero you get the DOS ASCII character set, which as interpreted in Windows or the browser or the Mac could be just about anything. With the zero you get the character you expect, which could be who knows what value but displays correctly.

Other superscript characters can of course be done with TGML but I find them not quite as tidy as the stand-alone characters:
[ignore]^{[/ignore]2[ignore]}[/ignore]
[ignore]^{[/ignore]anything you want[ignore]}[/ignore]

E²

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A sacrifice is harder when no one knows you've made it.

 

[elanor]

Dimandja, You pose an interesting question of writing etiquette! Clearly, you would need to use all of the necessary accents in any formal communication or document - scholarly or otherwise - but, in informal communication, wouldn't it come down to a question of courtesy? If I used the term Academie Francaise in an email to an American friend, I would do so without worrying about the accents, while, if the email was to a French friend, I would use it properly. It is, after all, my French friend's language.

 

[GwydionM]

When you say "English publications", do you really mean 'American' publications?

No, it is a single language that was standardised before the USA existed. Doctor Johnson's dictionary enshrined a lot of existing habits, including odd spellings used by Dutch printers working in London. Thus we are stuck with rough dough-faced ploughmen wandering through Slough. Long-vanished sounds like the 'w' in two and sword' And also nonsense like the 's' in island, based on a mistaken belief it was a word related to 'isle'.

Elsewhere, the language was defined later and more rationally, to define a standard for the spoken word as well as the written word.

The USA missed a great chance to produce a consistent spelling for English as they then spoke it. Instead they made some irritating little changes, color for colour etc.

Typewriters etc. were later designed without accents, at least for English-speakers. And the same thing was carried on when office-equipment makers like IBM built the early computers. It was almost entirely British and American and no one bothered with a quick or simple method for accents. No allowance for internationalism.

As for ESquared's useful hint, it runs into the trouble that their are 'dialects' of Ascii. It was originally a paper-tape language, and since the paper tape had 7 holes, only 128 characters were defined. Translated onto 8-bit computer bytes, an extra 128 characters were defined, but inconsistently. So you can carefully define an accented character and have it turn into something unreadable when it shifts between machines. You find this even in professional publications, with some odd symbol where quotation marks or similar would be expected.

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A view from the UK

 

[ESquared]

As for dialects of Ascii, that is why I said to use the zero in front of the number. This ensures you get a value that is more likely to be viewed on other computers correctly.

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