Persons Who Need Persons

[Beverly Flanigan]

And we Scandinavians must distinguish between the diacritics of Norwegian
and those of Swedish!  But American Scandies would change the o/slash to
'oe' and the a/circle to 'aa', wouldn't they?  I would also mark the
umlauts of German, of course, unless they too have been family-changed to
'oe' or 'ue'.
                                                Beverly (ne'e Olson) Flanigan
P.S. I just looked up the above French term in the dictionary to make sure
I put the accent over the right letter (I did--I intend the first one); but
my Webster's New World lists 'nee' WITHOUT the accent mark first and WITH
it second.  Which one is journalistic usage?


At 06:36 PM 7/22/99 -0700, you wrote:
>I pretty much agree with Beverly and wouldn't use diacritics on words I
>(completely subjectively) consider naturalized in English like cafe and
>facade. But, I would try to include the accent in a phrase like "catalogue
>raisonn'e" if I could--which I can't, using this e-mail system--because it
>gives seems necessary for pronunciation. I always try if possible to use
>the "o with a slash through it" also "the a with the small circle above
>it" and umlauts where required in Scandinavian names, since I am enough
>Norwegian to know that they are considered separate letters, not letters
>with diacritics. (Sorry for the description of the characters--if I could
>make this system use them, I would.)
>
>Allen
>maberry at u.washington.edu
>
>
>
>On Thu, 22 Jul 1999, Beverly Flanigan wrote:
>
>> At 04:02 PM 7/22/99 -0700, Andrea Vine wrote:
>> >When writing English words borrowed from other languages that are written
>> using
>> >the Latin alphabet plus diacritics, do you write the accent?  For
example, if
>> >you write the word "café" do you write the acute accent mark?  This
includes
>> >handwriting as well as typing.  Other words used to "illustrate" this
p.a.'s
>> >point were "façade" and "résumé".
>> >
>> >I and other self-confident
>> non-apologetic-for-our-culture-vs-European-Americans
>> >maintained that Americans in general do not write accents, don't learn
how to
>> >write the accents, don't learn to spell the words with accents, and in
some
>> >cases think writing the accents is a bit pretentious.
>> >
>> >What do y'all think? )
>> >
>>
>> For me, it depends on how recent or "foreign" the borrowing is (or seems to
>> be, since a lot of this is perception and not necessarily fact).  I never
>> use an accent with "cafe" but do with "resume," especially when I'm
>> referring to a specific one (sorry, I don't know how to do it on the
>> computer!).  "Facade" is somewhere in between.  It also depends on how
>> formal or scholarly the piece of writing is; I don't think pretentiousness
>> is the issue.  In fact, it seems to me British English follows the same
>> rule of thumb: old borrowings are completely anglicized, both in
>> pronunciation and in spelling (except for -our?); newer ones are betwixt
>> and between.
>>
>