On Thu, Dec 09, 2004 at 12:02:10PM -0800, Keith Packard wrote: > > Around 9 o'clock on Dec 9, John Thacker wrote: > > > Therefore, 0406 and 0456 should be removed from or commented out of ru.orth > > Done. Thanks > I know in my own typographical history I've seen the slow increase in the > set of glyphs considered "necessary" for proper English publication; novels > which 30 years ago would have been published in essentially ASCII > (originating as they did on typewriters) are now starting to include > accented characters as a guide to both the etymology and pronounciation of > words. Certainly common words like na?ve or r?sum? are more accurately > spelled with the appropriate accents than without. I don't know that I'd say that they are "more accurately spelled," honestly. I grant that in the case of r?sum? the final accent is useful due to the pronunciation, and to distinguish it from resume. Would you argue that h?tel should still be spelled that way? It is "more accurate," in a historical sense. ?ngstr?m? co?perate? (The last for phonetic but not etymological reasons-- you will see it used in the New Yorker for example.) To get really silly, ? propos? Ca?on instead of canyon? I agree that modern computers and technology make it easier to use accents, but I'm not completely convinced that their use is actually on the upswing. Most of the sources I've consulted claim that their use has been decreasing, though I suppose recent technology may have reversed that. In my experience, diacritical marks are used only in words perceived as foreign or of obvious foreign origin, and they tend to lose their accents. That said, they certainly are used. OTOH, not every font will include them even when they intend to cover English. It's an annoying problem. Being rendered in a single face is nice-- but I deal with a lot of Japanese documents which contain Latin characters, and often mixed Japanese/English. My Japanese fonts mostly do not contain all the accented Latin characters; this causes problems because Pango wants to render English words with fonts which support "en." Result is not using a single face even though the preferred Japanese font contains all characters on the page. Or, if you're not using Pango, then applications tend to assume that your en_US.UTF-8 locale means you want fonts which support "en," and thus will render Japanese UTF-8 documents using ugly fonts like MiscFixed in preference to other Japanese fonts. I know how to tweak the problem myself using weak family bindings, but there's a lot of discussion of it by Owen Taylor and others in a few places: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/beta/show_bug.cgi?id=138783 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/beta/show_bug.cgi?id=107952 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/beta/show_bug.cgi?id=107617 > So, I guess it's my cultural bias to encourage people to spell words right > rather than spelling them as if they were using an IBM selectric > typewriter. It was not done randomly. Most dictionaries I've seen contain the unaccented spelling only, or indicate it as the primary one with the accented as a variant, for most of those words, including naive/na?ve and resume/r?sum?. (The latter actually has a common variant with only the final accent mark, resum?, found in most dictionaries as well.) Of course, not only is the "certainly" disputed, but there are certainly those prescriptivists who argue that accents are not a part of English orthography at all, and belong only on foreign words. That said, many people do use them of course, and I'm a descriptivist. I may disagree with your "certainly" remark, but the usage may be enough to make it worth it. For me personally, however, it's a pain, since quite a lot of font writers do not consider accent marks to be essential for English support. (And really, they aren't essential at all.) John Thacker -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.freedesktop.org/pipermail/fontconfig/attachments/20041209/86062b66/attachment.pgp
