Diacritics and Accented Letters
Discussions center on whether diacritics like umlauts, sharp S, and accents in languages such as German, Swedish, Czech, and Polish are mere modifications or distinct letters, and their handling in text processing, sorting, normalization, and case conversion in computing.
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why outwith non latin languages accents and oddities like the sharp S dont actually change the meaning.
Weird how they overlooked the Ü
It’s not a different letter, it’s the same letter with a diacritic. It might be incorrect when writing in Icelandic but in English it’s no more incorrect than using cafe instead of café.
I want this, but in common Latin alphabet.
They are indeed separate letters, but this may not be clear to English speakers who are not used to diacritics.
It's more than that. In many languages, they aren't accents but different letters. In Swedish, the letter ä is not just an a with two dots over it. It's a completely different letter, pronounced differently and is sorted in a different part of the alphabet. Changing ä to a could compeltely change the meaning of a word. For example, "räka" means shrimp, while "raka" means straight.The same goes for names. Misspelling the name by not using the correct characte
Accented letters are not the only issue. Apart from the already mentioned apostrophes and hyphens, there are consonants with diacritics such as ç, č and ñ, or cases where substituting an “accented” letter with the corresponding unaccented one is not appropriate (e.g. ä in German is transcribed as ae in ASCII).
Diacritics are language-dependent, so using hungarian-meaning diacritics into english text makes no sense.
And what's with all the diacritics in the text?
The umlaut says it's not English.