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Comment by to3m | Hacker News Reader

This is all very helpful, but how do you spot English?

If the text contains only plain, boring letters and you see the word "the" being used a few times... you're looking at a text in English.

Though æ is used in English, too.

Quite rarely, however. Especially in American english (British English still uses it for some spellings, like "encyclopædia").

Yes, I have noted the American difference. Pedophile means something quite different!

And ë or ö, archaically ;)

And ï.

English with a lot of ë's and ö's means you're reading The New Yorker.

"our", "re", and "ise" (unless it's English from Oxford)

No diacritics, and generous use of apostrophes.

> No diacritics

An understandably naïve view of things whose errancy could easily be corrected through your coöperative perusal of The New Yorker.

Wouldn't it be cöoperative?

It wouldn't be. The goal is to separate the second o from the first, not to separate the o from the c:

The diaeresis indicates that a vowel should be pronounced apart from the letter that precedes it [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_%28diacritic%29#Diae...

Oh, true. Naive should have tipped me off.

To be fair, the original question was how to recognise English text, not how to recognise the archaic microcosm of English text that resides between the covers of The New Yorker.

That guideline would likely classify Xhosa as English. See https://xh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iphepha_Elingundoqo , which has no diacritics and three apostrophes.

Throw in "Mid-word capitals are (almost completely) absent in English".

To all sibling comments, I'm sure he meant how does someone who does not speak English, identify it by the letters?

And now that I think about it, how would you differentiate Latin and English?

In my case it'll be the only one that I can understand, innit?

The use of "w" puts it in the germanic group, then the additional usage of "qu" puts the romance sign on it. Usually, that is enough for me.

Pardon?

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