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DagAgren

Ironically, you can't even write proper English in ASCII. It is missing many characters widely used in English text.

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Amazon used to print my name with an HTML entity on the shipping labels.

Buggy software is buggy. Saying "who cares about accents?" only sweeps the problem under the rug.

Can you make a few examples?

I suppose emdash may count. Spellings like résumé or coöperate if you're fussy about that.

Though the New Yorker is an eminent institution, their usage is pretty uncommon. Definitely not “widely used.”

is "résumé" an English word?

EDIT: I guess then that also "café", "façade" and "señor" can retain their original spelling. The question is: where does it stop? will latin-1 suffice?

Latin-1 will definitely not suffice. And Unicode exists, and is near-universally supported and used. Just use it. It's ok. Really.

You most certainly can. a-z A-Z 0-9 and , . ? ! ; : - ' " ( ) should suffice in nearly all cases apart from anything hyper specialized. You could probably write the majority of all English literature with only those characters, and there's more characters I left off.

What other characters are "widely used" in English texts that are missing from ASCII

How do I write a letter to my fiancé?

What do I do when I want to take a break and go to a café?

How can I write about that cornerstone of English myth and legend, Bēowulf?

Perhaps ASCII itself is to blame, but in my experience the first two spellings you list are less widely used than "fiance" and "cafe", respectively.

I wouldn't base a paper on it, but (fiancé versus fiance): https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fianc%C3%A9%2C...

café versus cafe: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=caf%C3%A9%2Cca...

I argue "Bēowulf" is does not fall under "widely used." Even my high school version of it it was printed "Beowulf." I'm not claiming "ASCII contains all characters used at all in English," just refuting the claim that you can't "write proper English" with ASCII and that it is missing "widely used" characters.

You write just like everyone normally writes, by dropping the accent. I only see such spellings when people are trying to convey some sort of sophistication, rather than in casual, day-to-day use.

Precisely. Even when writing by hand, where there are no character encoding limitations, I've never seen anyone add the accents to "fiance" or "cafe" or "resume" when writing in English.

> I've never seen anyone add the accents to "fiance" or "cafe" or "resume" when writing in English.

We have café all the way from McDonalds up to Buckingham Palace.

https://www.mcdonalds.com/gb/en-gb/menu/mccafe.html

https://www.rct.uk/visit/the-state-rooms-buckingham-palace

You've quoted me out of context. I was referring to handwriting. Besides, I would bet dropping the accent is more common than including it.

"I only see such spellings when people are trying to convey some sort of sophistication"

McCafe and Buckingham Palace would want the "sophistication angle". Both spellings work obviously, but IMO (and the majority of English books) "cafe" is the "correct" spelling.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=caf%C3%A9%2Cca...

it's weird that when i search for "cafe dictionary" in google all the dictionaries except the Oxford Learner's Dictionary spell it as "café"

And most dictionaries have something to the effect of:

Variants: cafe

My first name is Émile. This is not some attempt at sophistication, it's just my name. It's kind of sad to see that even a simple accent like that is butchered by so many sites (I often see my name written as Ä©~mile)

Other languages figured out good compromises, e.g. Dostoyevsky is transliterated from Достоевский; the name of China's current dictator doesn't even render in my browser, but is transliterated to Jinping Xi. German passports have the German version for humans, and a standardized, transliterated version for computers. Gößmann becomes GOESSMANN. I see no reason why the same thing can't happen; just drop the accent from the E. Also, for some reason, my browser shows that E as having no accent, if you want an illustration of the problem.

A nitpick: Xi is his last name, but Chinese names are generally transliterated in the Chinese order of LAST FIRST ("Xi Jinping"). If you do a verbatim Google search for "Jinping Xi" you'll get around 500 results.

If a Chinese person adopts an English name, they'll put it first, however. Eg "Jake Ma".

Perhaps ſubſtitute a different letter.

Why, when we can use a proper encoding that actually contains the letters you want to use?

Accents and diacriticals are far from "hyper specialised", they are how many people are taught to write, and want to write.

And - is not a dash, it is a minus. It does not suffice as a replacement for a real en or em dash in a properly typeset text. This is also not "specialised", it is how English is correctly typeset.

And yet accents and diacritical marks are not widely used nor any longer exclusively "proper." You're fighting a losing battle. Language is changing underneath you, no matter how tightly you cling to it.

My name contains diacritics. Are you proposing that I should change my name? Because if so, that’s pretty condescending.

I can only think of no more than a few common English names that use diacritics, and most commonly drop them. Remember, this subthread spawned from discussing ASCII and English, not other languages.

I think you'd have to pretty deliberately misinterpret my comment about accents being uncommon in English to somehow think I was suggesting you change your name.

What battle are you referring to? A large majority of the world's population is speaking languages containing characters outside of ASCII. ASCII has no relevant future.

But this subthread is specifically about ASCII and English. So you point, while valid and true, is not relevant to this specific subthread.

I respectfully suggest you read my posts in this subthread because I don't believe you have. Instead, you appear to have taken my comment on accents in English completely out of context.

I did read the thread. It was about the irony that ASCII doesn't even cover English. Then you start to talk about a loosing battle. Still unclear which battle. Are you referring to the evolution of the English language into a language only using ASCII? Because if so that's completely off topic for the thread.

Source for claim many people are taught to use accents and diacriticals? Many people seem to have the opposite experience of being taught there are 26 unadorned letters in English.

I'd be surprised if any one of the 500ish English-language books on my shelves could be typeset entirely in ASCII without some compromises. Most are just fiction, too, and few could be characterized as "hyper specialized".

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