Comment by newsbinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by newsbinator | Hacker News Reader

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A lot of languages change their script for political reasons, rather than for convenience, and it shows.

If your language has more than 0 diacritics or if you have eight pronunciations for words that have an "ough" in them, then please re-evaluate how you write stuff down.

I can't imagine the billions of human attention-hours that have been lost to learning/editing/being confused by awkward writing rules. Obviously not only the script, but the spelling too.

Mrs. Delaney made me cry in first grade on my 6th attempt to spell "elephant" and I'll never forgive her.

    … diacritic symbols such as acute accent for high tone and grave
    accent for low tone …
  
    All too often, tone orthographies are established by fiat and
    defended by anecdote. Whether or not tone is marked, the most
    frequently cited justifications offered by the designers are either
    linguistic analysis, or socio-political factors, or an
    impressionistic evaluation that ‘we tried it and it seemed to work
    fine’. This article presents objective evidence that an existing
    tone orthography for an African tone language actually hinders
    fluent reading and writing.

http://cogprints.org/2173/3/lgsp42.pdf ( also http://cogprints.org/1446/5/identity.pdf )

I understand your gripe about inconsistent spelling, but what do you have against diacritics? Diacritics typically serve to make orthography more consistent in some matter, typically more phonetically consistent.

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