4 ms·
Pedantic pet peeve: spelling it as Hawaii instead of Hawai'i
by spraak 9y ago
Pedantic pet peeve: spelling it as Hawaii instead of Hawai'i
- rainbowmverse 9y agoI tried shaving this yak to out-pedant you on the assumption it was a transliteration of a non-Latin language, then found that Hawai'i's written language is (apparently) recent relative to the age of the language. Also, it has a history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_language
- nkurz 9y agoIs your peeve that you believe there exists some unwritten requirement that all place names must use identical spellings without consideration of the language they are written in? If so, I don't think this is reasonable. Words are allowed to change when they are taken from one language to another. It's spelled (and pronounced) Hawai'i when written in Hawaiian. But when writing in English, as the article is, it's typically spelled (and pronounced) Hawaii.
- rainbowmverse 9y agoEnglish may have no patience for diacritical marks (lack of them on keyboards doesn't help), but they're still a good idea when using words from other languages with pronunciations an English speaker wouldn't know intuitively.
- spraak 9y agoBoth the symbol/mark and the sound exist natively in English text and speech, so it bothers me in the same way someone might be bothered by mixing up their/they're or your/you're.
- __david__ 9y agoYes the mark exists, but it has a completely different meaning. It's used in a way that's not a plural, a contraction, or an indication of dropped letters. The mark makes zero sense in English.
- spraak 9y agoYou could say the same about most symbols in words that are used in English but that are not from English. Your point doesn't stand. Edit: I.e. it doesn't make it a reason not to use it. Even in English there are many sounds that are not pronounced how they're written. We still take the effort to put the 'w' in 'sword', but most will say 'sord'.