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…

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.

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

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.

And, luckily, Icelandic uses a Latin-based alphabet. Rendering Russian names in a Latin transliteration is mostly inconsistent without using ‘special’ characters like Å¡. 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? 😉

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.”