Diacritics on Jeopardy

[Benjamin Zimmer]

A similar complaint on the Noncompositional blog:

http://noncompositional.com/2008/02/hawaiian-okina-a-diacritic/


On Feb 12, 2008 12:55 PM, Barbara Need <nee1 at midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>
> And Wiki tells me that, officially (at the federal and state levels),
> it is <Hawaii>, without the apostrophe.
>
> New Mexico was my choice.
>
> On 12 Feb 2008, at 11:56, Paul Johnston wrote:
>
> > I agree--and it's interesting that another contestant put New Mexico--
> > technically right in English, but Spanish Nuevo Mexico would have an
> > acute accent on the e in "Mexico".
> >
> > On Feb 12, 2008, at 12:38 PM, Barbara Need wrote:
> >
> >> Last night's Final Jeopardy question had to do with the 50 States and
> >> asked which state name, when spelled officially, had a diacritic in
> >> it. The answer was Hawai'i, identifying the (I believe Alex said
> >> "mark") apostrophe between the final two vowels as a diacritic. That
> >> seemed wrong to me, since it represents, on its own, a glottal stop.
> >> Thoughts?

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