#diacritics — Public Fediverse posts

#CatchOfTheDay
#OpenAccess on
#MENAdoc:

"Beobachtungen von dem Gebrauche des syrischen Puncti diacritici bey den Verbis" by Johann Lorenz Isenbiehl

[Göttingen: Barmeier, 1773]

http://dx.doi.org/10.25673/98275

#syrian #verb #göttingen #diacritics

#CatchOfTheDay
#OpenAccess on
#MENAdoc:

"Beobachtungen von dem Gebrauche des syrischen Puncti diacritici bey den Verbis" by Johann Lorenz Isenbiehl

[Göttingen: Barmeier, 1773]

http://dx.doi.org/10.25673/98275

#syrian #verb #göttingen #diacritics

I added diacritics support to Plasma Keyboard!

https://merritt.codes/blog/2026/03/13/2026/_plasma-keyboard-funding-diacritics

Now I can more easily write German words as I continue learning it, such as: über, schön, and Straße!

Also, I can sprinkle my lovely symbols in my writing without having to resort to the compose key or copy-pasting — isn't that great‽ 😁

#kde #plasma #linux #diacritics

“How is that /ɲ/-sound spelled again?”
“I guess it depends. Is it Spanish or Portuguese?”
“It's ‘exotic’.”
“Oh, then you can spell it however you like!”

#diacritic #diacritics #DiacriticalConfusion #FaxeKondiñho #TypographyInTheWild

“How is that /ɲ/-sound spelled again?”
“I guess it depends. Is it Spanish or Portuguese?”
“It's ‘exotic’.”
“Oh, then you can spell it however you like!”

#diacritic #diacritics #DiacriticalConfusion #FaxeKondiñho #TypographyInTheWild

“How is that /ɲ/-sound spelled again?”
“I guess it depends. Is it Spanish or Portuguese?”
“It's ‘exotic’.”
“Oh, then you can spell it however you like!”

#diacritic #diacritics #DiacriticalConfusion #FaxeKondiñho #TypographyInTheWild

“How is that /ɲ/-sound spelled again?”
“I guess it depends. Is it Spanish or Portuguese?”
“It's ‘exotic’.”
“Oh, then you can spell it however you like!”

#diacritic #diacritics #DiacriticalConfusion #FaxeKondiñho #TypographyInTheWild

“How is that /ɲ/-sound spelled again?”
“I guess it depends. Is it Spanish or Portuguese?”
“It's ‘exotic’.”
“Oh, then you can spell it however you like!”

#diacritic #diacritics #DiacriticalConfusion #FaxeKondiñho #TypographyInTheWild

How is #Windows still so bad at entering characters with #diacritics? I know you can install custom keyboards or use alt-codes (and I have done both), but is there really no simpler way to use dead keys on a standard English keyboard? I guess I could switch to a Canadian French keyboard and remap my mental keyboard when I'm using Windows...or I could just do what I usually do and avoid Windows like the plague.

#keyboards #unicode #i18n

I've found only two heterophonic homonyms if non-English languages (and they're... arguable), and I'd be fascinated in hear if there are any others. I found:

1. #French couvent ("convent" or "to sit/brood on", although the latter is archaic)
2. #Portugese pelo ("hair" or "to peel", although my Portugese-speaking friend says she'd still spell the former "pêlo" despite the push to reform the language's #diacritics)

#language #linguistics

Fresh on my #blog: Words in English that would benefit from accents
#language #english #diacritics
thomasrigby.com/posts/words-in-english-that-would-benefit-from-accents/

We’re designing #Greek fonts like it’s the 1990s, when it comes to combining #diacritics.

Here’s Ᾰ̓́ and κ́ being poorly handled in an extensive system font (the first being used in philology, the other in dialectology). Very few fonts handle both properly, even when it is within their scope.
The first should look like Ἄ with the extra mark either below the other two on the left of or above the capital letter, the second should have the mark closer to and centred on the small letter.

According to #French #spelling rules you may leave #diacritics on capital letters...

#germany #fail #typography

@CatSte Was fur ein schones #caturday mit ein schones #kitty. Umarme ihn fur mich!

(No, my phone does not make #diacritics easy)

#Arabic #NLP #diacritics

https://github.com/mush42/libtashkeel

In case I haven't shared this before. The model being used with libtashkeel seems to be the most advanced I've seen yet.

Let's talk about #diacritics in #Polish.

There are 9 letters with diacritics. These are:

ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż.

They are generally transliterated into ASCII by losing the diacritics, and replacing with the resulting basic Latin letters:

a, c, e, l, n, o, s, z, z.

In lexical ordering, they are placed in this order after the respective basic Latin, i.e. the Polish alphabet is:

a, ą, b, c, ć, …, z, ź, ż.

As you can see, there are actually two diacritical variants of "z". In the commonly used "programmer's" Polish keyboard layout, all characters except for "ź" are obtained by combining AltGr with the Latin letter — "ź" is moved to the next key, "x". That is:

AltGr + a → ą
AltGr + c → ć
…
AltGr + x → ź
AltGr + z → ż

Now, many on-screen keyboards actually don't follow that design and place both "ź" and "ż" under "z". I personally find this annoying, and for my phone, I've specifically chosen a keyboard that placed "ź" under "x".

Another curious problem is that losing the diacritics sometimes causes collision with another word. Probably the most famous example is the sentence:

"Łaski mi nie robisz" → "It's not like you are doing me any favors"
"Laski mi nie robisz" → "You're not making me a blowjob"

Some people have been trying to do better than plain ASCII transliteration. I've mentioned before that some "Western European" layouts include "ó", so you may use that. Back in the day, a certain Polish version of Heroes of Might and Magic II (I think) used "t" in place of "ł". Then, you could try combining some characters on a typewriter (here I recommend playing with @mwichary 's Typewriter simulator: https://shifthappens.site/typewriter/).

Oh, and there's also the possibility of writing "ƶ" instead of "ż" (especially in uppercase, where the dot might make the letter undesirably tall), though some people apparently write "ƶ" in place of "z" instead (to make it distinctive from "2").

Phonetics next. I'm not going to go over the whole Polish phonetics, because I have neither the space nor the skills to do that. But let's go over the diacritical letters and consider their phonetic equivalents.

ą, ę → nasal o, e

They are phonetically similar to "om", "on" and "em", "en" respectively, sometimes leading to spelling errors. You could have words such as "romb" /rɔ̃mp/ (= rhombus) and "rąb" /rɔ̃mp/ (= chop!).

ć, ń, ś, ź → apparently these are palatal versions of c, n, s, z, whatever that means (I don't think these sounds are possible in English)

They are phonetically similar to some pronunciations of "cI", "ni", "si", "zi" (but not all, enjoy good spelling system). For example, the "ci" in "cień" /ʨ̑ɛ̇̃ɲ/ (= shadow) is pronounced the same as "ć" in "ćma" /ʨ̑ma/ (= moth), but "ci" in "cis" /ʨ̑is/ (= yew) is more like "ć" + explicit "i", and then you have "cirrus" with hard "c" and "i" /ˈt͡sir.rus/.

ł → well, it's the Polish /w/ ("w" is the Polish /v/)

Sometimes "u" is actually read as "ł", e.g. in the onomatopoeia "miau" (= meow). In some cases of Internet slang, people are actually replacing "ł" to "u"… to look cuter, I guess? Then there's "miał" /mjaw/ (= powder, also past form of "to have").

ó → it's actually the same as "u" (it's called "u closed")

Apparently, historically it was a long "o", but eventually transformed into plain "u". It's another spelling nightmare for school pupils, seemingly randomly spread between words such as "bród" /brut/ (= ford) and "brud" /brut/ (= filth).

ż → something like the "si" in "vision"

For funs, in some words this is also written as a digraph "rz". Again, pupils can enjoy distinguishing between "żyć" /ʐɨt͡ɕ/ (= to live) and "rzyć" /ʐɨt͡ɕ/ (= arse).

Well, there's much more where that came from (say, "ch" vs. "h"), but why am I talking about this particular aspect of diacritics? Because a curious (but horrible, just don't do that) idea of transliterating diacritical letters is to replace them with their phonetic equivalents, or approximations. So, instead of:

Zażółć gęślą jaźń

one could write:

Zarzuuci gensilom jazini

Except that nobody could read this properly, and also it just occurred to me that I've mapped both "ł" and "ó" into "u". Well, let's pretend you didn't see that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_alphabet#Letters:_aspect,_name,_value

#Arabic #diacritics #NLP

I enjoyed this article breaking down the complexity of adding vowels to Arabic using NLP (or deep learning):

https://interscript.org/blog/2021-08-03-diacritization-in-arabic-with-deep-learning/

@fay

Such issues always remind me of this Typotheque blog post by Peter Biľak:

https://www.typotheque.com/articles/lcaron

#LCaron #Caron #CaronDiacritic #diacritics #diacritic #apostrophe

@fay

Such issues always remind me of this Typotheque blog post by Peter Biľak:

https://www.typotheque.com/articles/lcaron

#LCaron #Caron #CaronDiacritic #diacritics #diacritic #apostrophe

@fay

Such issues always remind me of this Typotheque blog post by Peter Biľak:

https://www.typotheque.com/articles/lcaron

#LCaron #Caron #CaronDiacritic #diacritics #diacritic #apostrophe

@fay

Such issues always remind me of this Typotheque blog post by Peter Biľak:

https://www.typotheque.com/articles/lcaron

#LCaron #Caron #CaronDiacritic #diacritics #diacritic #apostrophe

In modern usage of the #EnglishLanguage , I seldom see #DiacriticalMarks (#diacritics), and the #diaeresis is particularly rare.

"The diaeresis diacritic indicates that two adjoining letters that would normally form a digraph and be pronounced as one sound, are instead to be read as separate vowels in two syllables." (from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic) )

Words such as "coordinate" and "reenter" can be cumbersome (especially to those relatively new to the language); versions with diaeresis ("coördinate" and "reënter") became archaic and replaced by their hyphenated versions ("co-operate" and "re-enter").

Yet "naïve" persists and has not (yet) become "na-ive".

As Unicode has largely surpassed ASCII, I think more people use the diaeresis rather than spelling it "naive" (which, appropriately, now seems naïve).

Today I had occasion to use "albeit", and thought it might benefit from a diaeresis.

If we were to try to improve it, which form do you think might best aid the reader?

#linguistics

In modern usage of the #EnglishLanguage , I seldom see #DiacriticalMarks (#diacritics), and the #diaeresis is particularly rare.

"The diaeresis diacritic indicates that two adjoining letters that would normally form a digraph and be pronounced as one sound, are instead to be read as separate vowels in two syllables." (from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic) )

Words such as "coordinate" and "reenter" can be cumbersome (especially to those relatively new to the language); versions with diaeresis ("coördinate" and "reënter") became archaic and replaced by their hyphenated versions ("co-operate" and "re-enter").

Yet "naïve" persists and has not (yet) become "na-ive".

As Unicode has largely surpassed ASCII, I think more people use the diaeresis rather than spelling it "naive" (which, appropriately, now seems naïve).

Today I had occasion to use "albeit", and thought it might benefit from a diaeresis.

If we were to try to improve it, which form do you think might best aid the reader?

#linguistics

In modern usage of the #EnglishLanguage , I seldom see #DiacriticalMarks (#diacritics), and the #diaeresis is particularly rare.

"The diaeresis diacritic indicates that two adjoining letters that would normally form a digraph and be pronounced as one sound, are instead to be read as separate vowels in two syllables." (from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic) )

Words such as "coordinate" and "reenter" can be cumbersome (especially to those relatively new to the language); versions with diaeresis ("coördinate" and "reënter") became archaic and replaced by their hyphenated versions ("co-operate" and "re-enter").

Yet "naïve" persists and has not (yet) become "na-ive".

As Unicode has largely surpassed ASCII, I think more people use the diaeresis rather than spelling it "naive" (which, appropriately, now seems naïve).

Today I had occasion to use "albeit", and thought it might benefit from a diaeresis.

If we were to try to improve it, which form do you think might best aid the reader?

#linguistics

In modern usage of the #EnglishLanguage , I seldom see #DiacriticalMarks (#diacritics), and the #diaeresis is particularly rare.

"The diaeresis diacritic indicates that two adjoining letters that would normally form a digraph and be pronounced as one sound, are instead to be read as separate vowels in two syllables." (from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic) )

Words such as "coordinate" and "reenter" can be cumbersome (especially to those relatively new to the language); versions with diaeresis ("coördinate" and "reënter") became archaic and replaced by their hyphenated versions ("co-operate" and "re-enter").

Yet "naïve" persists and has not (yet) become "na-ive".

As Unicode has largely surpassed ASCII, I think more people use the diaeresis rather than spelling it "naive" (which, appropriately, now seems naïve).

Today I had occasion to use "albeit", and thought it might benefit from a diaeresis.

If we were to try to improve it, which form do you think might best aid the reader?

#linguistics

In modern usage of the #EnglishLanguage , I seldom see #DiacriticalMarks (#diacritics), and the #diaeresis is particularly rare.

"The diaeresis diacritic indicates that two adjoining letters that would normally form a digraph and be pronounced as one sound, are instead to be read as separate vowels in two syllables." (from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic) )

Words such as "coordinate" and "reenter" can be cumbersome (especially to those relatively new to the language); versions with diaeresis ("coördinate" and "reënter") became archaic and replaced by their hyphenated versions ("co-operate" and "re-enter").

Yet "naïve" persists and has not (yet) become "na-ive".

As Unicode has largely surpassed ASCII, I think more people use the diaeresis rather than spelling it "naive" (which, appropriately, now seems naïve).

Today I had occasion to use "albeit", and thought it might benefit from a diaeresis.

If we were to try to improve it, which form do you think might best aid the reader?

#linguistics

TIL how to enter a special character (š) in Emacs using the character composition method:

"To get a list of all available character compositions type C-x 8 C-h."

https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/diacritics-in-emacs

#Emacs #Diacritics #Characters #TextEntry #Editors

Today I should like to offer a shout-out to the Vietnamese alphabet, which stands as an eternal reproach to everyone who claims that you can in fact sprinkle too many accents on your conlang.

#conlang #diacritics #critics-of-diacritics

The characters of Competition, with random values for width, slant, and inline weight.

Of course it supports the non-Eurocentric Latin S character set:
https://github.com/koeberlin/Latin-Character-Sets

#typography #fonts #languages #diacritics

"The System Can't Handle Her Real Name"

Etrigan has posted "The Side Eye: The Stink A," linking to The Spinoff's really well-done and fascinating infographic on "the glitchy macron" that highlights how font decisions and usage can have an outsized impact on non-Anglo populations.

https://www.metafilter.com/198114/The-Stink-A

#macron #diacritics #pronunciation #meaning #typography #fonts #Maori #language #NewZealand #inclusion #IndigenousPeople

On the topic of macrons (◌̄, ¯, ¯: one of the #diacritics featured in the major latinization systems for #Ottoman Turkish, hence used e.g. in our https://github.com/QHOD/ota-keyboard input method), we learn from a nice editorial cartoon that those matter in other languages as well, namely for Māori: https://thespinoff.co.nz/atea/24-01-2023/the-side-eye-the-stink-a. Thanks @klim for sharing #encoding #typography