A question that may make you smile

[Andy Knight]

To get some kind of clue you can look at the Unicode charts, especially
under latin-extended (if that is what you're talking about at any rate).
The IPA stuff is separated so that would help but some of the accents in
Unicode are used primarily by scholars.

I think the bigger issue is the scope of what you're talking about, do you
mean in terms of accents in active written language by native
speakers/writers of latin script languages? Do you include conversions from
other writing systems? A great deal of the "accents" out there are just
ways to write in the many latin-based languages that were the primary modes
of academic discourse in the west (e.g. many symbols were created to
transcribe languages such as Arabic for discussion by Western Orientalists
but are not/were not in use by the native speakers, they already had a
script). Though some of these systems have been adopted by native speakers
of languages that either had no written component or wanted to disassociate
from a previous script (For instance Serbo-Croatian is written both in
Cyrillic and Latin alphabets for reasons of cultural and political
affiliation (towards eastern or western Europe respectively), at least when
the separation was first made).

If the question was asked simply to see the variety and depth of different
notations and extensions of the latin script then check out the unicode
page, and I think even IPA is somewhat enlightening though it isn't in use
as a "native" language. If it was asked to know how many are in active use
that's a much more complicated question where any answer could be subject
to interpretation.

For some humor along those lines though there is the poor village of Hörby
Sweden. They have the unfortunate web site from their town www.horby.se.
Which means "fornication village" since they can't have the o with
the diaeresis on it (ö) in a website name.

Some of this is discussed in The Multilingual
Internet<http://books.google.com/books?id=8PqvT50OC_EC&pg=PA9&lpg=PA9&dq=ASCII+imperialism&source=bl&ots=sD6rH2WPeG&sig=zhuaK8zUkf9RjDQIRa8kVClHBeo&hl=en&sa=X&ei=XIoxT92FOpCc-waunPjiBQ&ved=0CFEQ6AEwBg>as
well as the source for the Hörby story:

Pargman, Daniel and Palme, Jacob (2009). "ASCII imperialism". In Martha
Lampland and Susan Leigh Star (eds.), "Standards and their stories: How
quantifying, classifying, and formalizing practices shape everyday life",
pp.177-199. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Reading up on Unicode is fairly enlightening too.

Anyway I hope this helps, I typed this quickly because I'm at work so my
apologies if I typoed anything or crossed my facts. I had to jump on this
though because the research for my Masters Thesis was on these lines.

-Andy Knight
M.A Columbia University (currently not in academia but still on the list)

On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 2:49 PM, Elizabeth Spreng <elispreng at aol.com> wrote:

>  Hello,
> Last night I received an email from a student that included a indirect
> question from a colleague that I was being asked to answer. I really did
> not know how to to begin to answer this question (and perhaps I do not
> understand the question itself), so I thought I would ask for some help.
> Here goes
>
> How many accents/modifiers are there?
>
>
>
> I believe they are asking about written accents ( but they were not asking
> about IPA notation) used in all of the languages currently considered
> viable. "They" said the question came up in a discussion of emic/etic
> differences, but I have been unable to get any more information of what
> they are desiring for an answer or why they asked such a question. Although
> something (well maybe more than one thing) irks me about this question from
> a philosophical perspective, I told them that I would see if I could obtain
> an answer.
>
>  All best,
>
> Elizabeth Spreng, PhD
> Assistant Professor
> Kansas State University
>