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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

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.

Perhaps ſubſtitute a different letter.

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

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".

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