Just for the record, I don’t think English has any business using diacriticals. If we like a foreign word enough to borrow it, we should Anglicize it to our liking, and if necessary, change the spelling.
Let everyone else in the world have their accents and tildes and umlauts and cedillas and ligatures and all that; it’s their business. But that imposes no obligation on English.
(BTW, if you’ve ever seen the wide-spread comment on the Web that only English, Hawaiian, and Swahili use the Latin aphabet with no diacriticals or special characters, it’s not true. The claim is taken from a report produced in the Sperry Corp. back in the ’70s. I knew that man who wrote it and he told me he just made up the factoid, not having researched it at all. There are others besides those three. So beware of believing everything you read on the Internet. Excepting this, of course.)
Just for the record, I don’t think English has any business using diacriticals. If we like a foreign word enough to borrow it, we should Anglicize it to our liking, and if necessary, change the spelling.
Let everyone else in the world have their accents and tildes and umlauts and cedillas and ligatures and all that; it’s their business. But that imposes no obligation on English.
(BTW, if you’ve ever seen the wide-spread comment on the Web that only English, Hawaiian, and Swahili use the Latin aphabet with no diacriticals or special characters, it’s not true. The claim is taken from a report produced in the Sperry Corp. back in the ’70s. I knew that man who wrote it and he told me he just made up the factoid, not having researched it at all. There are others besides those three. So beware of believing everything you read on the Internet. Excepting this, of course.)