Linguistic Strip-tease,
or,
Typographic Discrimination

Among the many languages of the world, that are written using versions of the Latin alphabet, English is a happy exception. In principle, it is possible to write proper English without using any diacritics. In many other languages, however, there is a multitude of different accents and hooks, varying from frank German umlauts to Vietnamese double-accents.

In spite of advanced technology and the Unicode character convention, people are still in the habit of neglecting the diacritics of foreign languages. These are mostly needed for writing the names of persons and places. I think this practice is now outdated. Computerized typesetting allows one to readily produce all foreign graphemes with no real difficulty. The other, seemingly easier solution — to neglect the diacritics altogether — is simply typographic discrimination. It is to be avoided. People have the right to see their name spelled properly. In some cases the meaning of a word, and usually the pronunciation, changes if diacritics are omitted. Often the diacritics affect the alphabetical ordering of a word (in Finnish and in Estonian, for instance, the rules for alphabetical ordering are rather complicated). Also, search engines may be sensitive to missing diacritics.

By the way, this problem is encountered in Russian as well, albeit on a smaller scale. The Russian letter Ё is usually typeset as “Е”, because Ё is missing from some keyboards. In Russian, this is a completely appropriate solution. Transliterations should not, however, be made from a stripped down spelling. Because of that practice, certain established transliterations, like “Gorbachev”, “Khrushchev”, “Potemkin”, and “Rublev”, are erroneous, and they should be corrected: Gorbachov (Горбачёв), Khrushchov (Хрущёв), Potyomkin (Потёмкин), and Rublyov (Рублёв). Actually some modern encyclopædias do carry these.

As for various special characters, it is more difficult to give a general guideline. It is recommendable to retain the Scandinavian æ and the French œ, for instance, but it is customary to replace the German ß with ss in other languages as it always can be so spelled in German — it would look awkward indeed to write “Straußian” or “straußmainen”. If a proper name begins with the Dutch ij, it is to be written with two capitalized letters: IJsselmeer. In some languages there are unique characters not in use in many others, like the Icelandic ð and þ. They should be retained as well if it is inappropriate to circumvent them in the language in question.

Contrary to a common belief, the French diacritics are to be written on uppercase letters (e.g., È, Ê, À) as well as on lowercase ones.

In some cases, as with the Turkish ı, you actually need to leave something out because in Turkish i / İ and ı / I are different letters. Furthermore, there are letters with which you need different diacritics for lowercase and uppercase letters, e.g. the Latvian ģ / Ģ and Czech ď / Ď and ť / Ť. You need to take this into consideration in those rare cases when you apply the “Small Caps” function of your text processor to a name like Kát’a Kabanová: instead of KÁŤA KABANOVÁ you might end up with “KÁT’A KABANOVÁ”.

The conceptual line between a diacritic character, a ligature and a unique new letter is not always very clear (e.g., with ð, ł and ø). In Latin, æ can be interpreted as a ligature, an alternative way of writing ae, but in certain Scandinavian languages it is an individual letter and cannot be written as a digraph. (Like the German umlauts, it has evolved from digraphs.)

I have assembled below a list of well-known personal names that are usually stripped of diacritics. Suggestions for additions are welcome! This is not intended to be a complete catalogue of the world’s typographic laziness — the Internet itself seems to be that. All these names are written originally in Latin alphabet, so you shouldn’t transliterate or alter them in any way. There are only a very few cases in which the diacritics can be circumvented in spelling (as in German: ü = ue). However, if you aren’t exactly sure about an acceptable alternative, please don’t try it! — The list is in Finnish alphabetical order.

Other useful resources that might be of interest for you:

• Alphabetical order in Finnish (document in Finnish)
• Character database from the Institute of the Estonian Language
• The letters Š, Ž and Č in written Estonian (document in Estonian)
• The letters Š and Ž in written Finnish
• Accented uppercase characters in French (document in French)
• National & special characters in HTML
• National keyboard layouts
• Finnish Multilingual Keyboard by Microsoft
• Unicode Home Page
• “Oops...” — my list of commonly misspelled names.

Last updated: June 20^th, 2014.