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Comment by arc2 | Hacker News Reader

The problem I see there is you think there is only English. While you may write "naïve" as "naive" and lose nothing, there are some other languages too and the advantage of Latin is that it's visual and Latin letters can be slightly changed to have something similar but different.

Do you think "Fußgängerübergänge" can be read as "Fussgangerubergange" or "zażółć" as "zazolc"? (German and Polish respectively)

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While I do get your point, Germans specifically handle the lack of umlauts (e.g. in digital spaces that don't allow them) by simply substituting "ä" with "ae", "ö" with "oe" and "ü" with "ue". Similarly, "ß" can be replaced with "ss" without losing much readability at all.

As a contrary to the other comments to parent, I'd say that in French and Slovak, although many people do not use accents on chat platforms and irc, they are very important in longer prose. These languages, without accents, would be very hard and slow to read. So yeah, for languages with no accents this might be fine but that's it.

I added several characters to the Dotsies font for other languages in response to requests. They have accents above the dots.

There was a thread here (found it) just the other day where Polish people specifically said "we don't use those accented characters any more because it's too hard on mobile and we don't need to" (heavy paraphrasing mine).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18688619

I see a Slovenian person claiming that, I think, but no Poles.

Also, often those "accents" are different sounds. Ș in Romanian is sh, ț is ts, ă is uh, â is a sound which is not present in English (at least not explicitly). You can get rid of them but there's definitely ambiguity. Even French has é which sounds nothing like the French e.

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