Timeline for Why does the i in "naïve" have two dots?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
14 events
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| Feb 22, 2015 at 12:53 | comment | added | Tim Pederick | @supercat: Yep, that's exactly what I was getting at. | |
| Feb 21, 2015 at 18:25 | comment | added | supercat | ...made it practical to type accented characters but didn't turn printable ASCII characters like quote marks into dead keys. The 1990's Macintosh layout was great in that regard (shift+apostrophe is a quote mark; option+shift+apostrophe is a dead key for a umlaut/diaeresis); I wish Microsoft would do something similar with Windows. | |
| Feb 21, 2015 at 18:21 | comment | added | supercat | @TimPederick: I think the English form "resumé" keeps the second accent but not the first because the first syllable isn't stressed and thus the first accent doesn't affect pronunciation much, while the second changes the word from two syllables to three-syllables--a much greater effect. Use of accents to change pronunciation in English used to be common; Shakespeare, for example, would write the past tense of "to banish" with an accent (banishèd) when it needed to be three syllables, to distinguish it from the two-syllable "banish'd". I wish Windows had included a US keyboard layout which... | |
| Feb 20, 2015 at 16:28 | comment | added | Shane | @tkp Putting the cedielle would make it be pronounced 'ace-tually' | |
| Feb 20, 2015 at 14:47 | comment | added | yo' |
@JonStory That's exactly the point: There is NOTHING like a standard pronunciation of letters in English. The tréma over i in naïve is really just a relict from French, nothing more.
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| Feb 20, 2015 at 11:27 | comment | added | Jon Story | No, because ua is usually (!) pronounced like that :) the diacritic is used where the sound is different to the standard pronunciation... as if English has such a thing as standard pronunciation | |
| Feb 19, 2015 at 22:21 | history | edited | Jasper | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Improved formatting.
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| Feb 19, 2015 at 18:58 | comment | added | user8719 | @WoJ, shouldn't that be "açtüally" :-) | |
| Feb 19, 2015 at 14:56 | history | edited | rogermue | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Feb 18, 2015 at 14:26 | history | edited | rogermue | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Feb 18, 2015 at 10:13 | comment | added | Tim Pederick | English doesn't use diacritics on its own words very often ("coöperate", mentioned elsewhere, being one example), but it's more likely to keep them on borrowed words when it affects pronunciation (like "café", and "résumé", which tends to shed the first one but not the second). | |
| Feb 18, 2015 at 9:08 | history | edited | rogermue | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Feb 18, 2015 at 8:57 | history | edited | rogermue | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Feb 18, 2015 at 8:51 | history | answered | rogermue | CC BY-SA 3.0 |