Comments on: Style Sheet

By: Thomas

Thomas — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 05:04:12 +0000

Ahh! The beatings Scandinavian languages take when published in English-speaking newspapers! This past summer I wrote a cross letter to The Economist when they flagrantly violated all rules of Finnish vowel harmony and common sense more than twice in one issue:

Dear Sir,
In your most recent issue (August 2-8), you made two separate allusions to Finnish sportsmen — Eero Mäntyranta and Kimi Räikkönen. In both cases you misspelled their names, leaving out what are in Finnish crucial diacritic marks over the vowels. In the same issue however, you accurately referred to Hugo Chávez, Germaine de Staël, and among others, Société Général (which even does away with the accents in its official logo). In the future please take into account the linguistic requirements of less spoken languages such as Finnish, if only to keep those who are familiar with them from cringing. Names in the alphabetically challenging Turkish and Serbo-Croatian languages also deserve to be spelled properly, as they share the Latin alphabet (albeit with quite a few adjustments).

It never got published, and I never did hear back from them…

By: Carah A. Naseem

Carah A. Naseem — Mon, 25 May 2009 15:51:47 +0000

Oh, by above post, I mean the one after this one. Sorry for any confusion.

By: Carah A. Naseem

Carah A. Naseem — Mon, 25 May 2009 15:51:01 +0000

Killian: I think SOMEONE has to. English is under the impression that it can truncate and bastardize other languages for the sake of convenience. It’s absurd, and takes too many liberties as a lingua franca.
As Nico addressed in the above post, though, this developing internet ebonics of “azz” etc., can also be seen in other languages. In French, expressions are truncated as well. I’ve seen “c’est” becoming “ce” and “je suis” becoming “j’suis” and so on. Perhaps in English it is more shocking because vulgar words are being bastardized further? I’ve really no idea. But I think languages should at least stick to screwing themselves up, rather than take the liberty to screw other languages up.

By: killian

killian — Sun, 24 May 2009 13:55:45 +0000

Carah: love the attempt to save linguistic dignity. Liner Notes Danny, I would SO subscribe to a Nico lifestyle magazine. How utterly f:a:b!

By: PJ Doland

PJ Doland — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:17:58 +0000

I’ll agree that their style guidelines seem stupid, but, the ease of copying and pasting a name accurately doesn’t solve the problem of readability.

Should we render Japanese names in ideographs just because unicode can handle it? And should Russian names be written in cyrillic, even though most readers wouldn’t have the foggiest idea how to pronounce them?

You have to draw a line somewhere.

By: Liner Notes Danny

Liner Notes Danny — Fri, 22 May 2009 18:53:00 +0000

Yay, PJ Doland is on the ball. But isn’t this policy kind of obsolete now that, as Reb points out, computers make it extremely easy to check and correct your special Hungarian characters?

By: Stephen

Stephen — Fri, 22 May 2009 05:57:54 +0000

David: I think your argument is refuted by the reality that people do, in fact, listen to his music, which makes how it got noticed pretty obsolete.

By: David

David — Thu, 21 May 2009 23:39:34 +0000

“David can go autofellate.” Charming. Nico, evidently this is your audience. Knock yourself out. Enjoy it; be grateful you have enough famous friends to get you noticed.

By: Larry-bob Roberts

Larry-bob Roberts — Thu, 21 May 2009 05:52:56 +0000

Oh, cool, you’re doing shows at the Southern Theater in Minneapolis. It has a nice decayed ambience, like a miniature Brooklyn Academy of Music. I love the venue — I saw Ron Vawter do his Roy Cohn/Jack Smith piece there, and Saturdays at midnight there’s the world’s best open mic, Balls.

My Minneapolis off-beat tourist destination suggestion: The Bakken: A Library and Museum of Electricity in Life.

By: Carah A. Naseem

Carah A. Naseem — Thu, 21 May 2009 04:28:43 +0000

I just don’t understand the concept of rehashing a Goscinny & Uderzo creation.

As to the usage of diacritics, consider this perhaps, someone typing on a laptop? As callous and dismissive as it sounds… I too am crippled by the absence of a number pad.
So I cannot just do alt + 0232 and get my aigu (wait… is that aigu or grave…?)
I too must type Bjork. But actually, a few weeks ago, my friend and I have settled on a “poor man’s Björk” … Bj:ork. To save face and at least prove that there is some form of linguistic dignity left in this world.

By: Rachel K.

Rachel K. — Wed, 20 May 2009 23:01:15 +0000

Very cool entry, I agree.

By: Bert

Bert — Wed, 20 May 2009 22:06:13 +0000

I spent an inordinate amount of time looking for pictures of Astêrix and Ob¥lix.

By: Benjamin

Benjamin — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:09:04 +0000

Reich was in “Newsweek”, and now you’re in there, too. Must be part of that “rebranding effort”. There aren’t as many articles about Hugh Jackman or Sanjaya as there once were.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:22:53 +0000

It’s probably more dependent on the individual writer. If they leave out diacritics/non-basic Latin characters or include them, the editor may not really notice. Names in Icelandic are also a restricted set of words such that a native speaker of Icelandic (while bothered by lack of orthographic correctness) would at least know what was going on, unless there are Ólöfs and Ölófs.

And, luckily, Icelandic uses a Latin-based alphabet. Rendering Russian names in a Latin transliteration is mostly inconsistent without using ’special’ characters like š. I’ve seen Сергей written “Serge”, “Sergei” and “Serguei”, and then Щ is rendered as shch, sch, and sh (despite that Ш ’sh’ and Щ ’shch’ are two separate sounds in Russian).

At least they still know who they’re talking about, right?

By: PJ Doland

PJ Doland — Tue, 19 May 2009 13:53:03 +0000

I was in the bookstore today, so I picked up the New York Times Manual of Style to see if there was a sensible explanation for the apparent inconsistency.

Their guidelines dictate that accents (and presumably other diacritics) are used only for words that are either French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, or German.

It specifically says not to use them for Scandinavian or Slavic languages, as their use is less familiar to most American writers, editors, and readers and the marks would be “prone to error.”