[EDLING:1978] what's in an accent?

Sun Oct 22 12:47:50 UTC 2006

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To: FORENSIC-LINGUISTICS at JISCMAIL.AC.UK 
Sent: Sunday, October 22, 2006 8:11 AM
Subject: [FL-LIST] what's in an accent?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061021/ap_on_bi_ge/accents_please

Newspapers struggle with name accents 
By LLAURA WIDES-MUNOZ Sat Oct 21, 12:17 PM ET 
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - When journalist Aly Colon began his career, he always made the same request to his editors. Could he please have an accent? Colon, a Puerto Rican native, writes his name with an accent over the second "o" to distinguish it from the less than elegant body part. When his editors said they couldn't or wouldn't add the slash to his byline, Colon began adding it by hand before the paper went to press.
"My father told me that I had a family name, and that that was a name I was to grow up and honor," said Colon, "and one of the important elements of honoring that name was spelling it right."
Most people with an accent in their name don't have the option of knocking on the door of the local copy editor, nor do they have Colon's passion on the issue. But with the number of Hispanics in the U.S. rising, up more than 18 percent since 2000 according to the U.S. Census, and overall newspaper readership on the decline, many media companies are looking at ways to respond to the shift in demographics - and are rethinking just how tough it is to add the squiggly lines.
Newspapers have long maintained that technological problems and editorial confusion make it too difficult to add accents, officially known as diacritical marks. For Colon, now a faculty member at The Poynter Institute of journalism in St. Petersburg, Fla., it's a question of accuracy, one of the basic tenets of journalism.
The absence of accents can change the pronunciation and the meaning of a word.
The name Pena, without the tilde over the "n," means shame. The Spanish word for year without that squiggle becomes a nu s.
Iris Llorente, 21, of Doral, Fla. whose mother emigrated to the U.S. from Cuba, said she doesn't expect to see accents in the English press.
"I don't take it too seriously. I usually think it's funny when I see it wrong," she said. But Llorente echoed other Hispanic newspaper readers when she added that seeing the accent marks "would be nice. You always want them to get it right."
Yolanda Gomez, 30, a financial sales analyst in Los Angeles, also questioned why the use of accents on some French words such as resume are accepted but not on Spanish words.
"The French do it, why don't we?" she questioned.
Advertisers have been quicker to make the change.
Cartier's newest "La Dona" line of watches, created in honor of Mexican actress Maria Felix, features the tilde over the "n," distinguishing the product from the Spanish word for donut.
"When you're persuading people, you want to eliminate any barriers to the communication," said Carl Kravetz, chairman of the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies. "If you're borrowing the word from another language anyway, you might as well get it right."
In recent years, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald and other large newspapers have begun to add them, as have smaller papers, but they are usually applied inconsistently and are far more likely to appear in the style section than the news pages.
"If you did choose to use accent marks, your staff would have to be knowledgeable enough about when to use them," said St. Petersburg Times executive editor John Schlander, explaining why his paper does not use them. "Some people are going to be bilingual, but others aren't. Then there's the wire services, and what are their policies."
Many papers blame The Associated Press for going accentless. The wire service's 2006 stylebook says accents shouldn't be used "because they cause garble in many newspaper computers."
Yet the issue is far from closed at the AP, where senior editors are looking at ways to insert accents in the names of individuals who prefer them. The wire service has long transmitted accents on its non-English wires. 
"It's something we look at all the time," AP Stylebook editor Norman Goldstein said. "The biggest problem is where do you stop once you start? Doing it in Spanish would be more useful, but you can't just have diacritical marks for one language." 
The technology issue is changing as more newspapers switch to computer software that can handle the coding necessary to read the marks transmitted by AP. Editorial software provider Atex Limited, which serves 50 small and medium papers throughout the U.S. said all its systems can support accents. 
Even Colon said he sees the accent over his "o" more frequently these days. 
The Los Angeles Times instituted an official policy a few years back to add the tilde. 
"It's a fractional step along the lines of using accent marks," said Clark P. Stevens, chief of the paper's copy desks. 
Stevens said the issue is difficult especially for the international desk, which has the most words to check and still gets much of its copy through e-mail and other systems that may change the accent. Also, many Hispanics in Los Angeles have lived several generations in the U.S. and no longer even use an accent, he said. 
But Stevens says he believes the trend is toward more accents. 
"It goes back to Journalism 101 and accuracy, and identification of a person is a primary element of information in a news story," he said. "We've been edging down the road to using accents for a long, long time. I think we'll go more that way." 
____________ 
Associated Press writer Solvej Schou in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
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