7 ms·
Ironically, you can't even write proper English in ASCII. It is missing many characters widely used in English text.
by DagAgren 7y ago
Ironically, you can't even write proper English in ASCII. It is missing many characters widely used in English text.
- ithkuil 7y agoCan you make a few examples?
- tedunangst 7y agoI suppose emdash may count. Spellings like résumé or coöperate if you're fussy about that.
- turdnagel 7y agoThough the New Yorker is an eminent institution, their usage is pretty uncommon. Definitely not “widely used.”
- ithkuil 7y agois "résumé" an English word? EDIT: I guess then that also "café", "façade" and "señor" can retain their original spelling. The question is: where does it stop? will latin-1 suffice?
- DagAgren 7y agoLatin-1 will definitely not suffice. And Unicode exists, and is near-universally supported and used. Just use it. It's ok. Really.
- nkrisc 7y agoYou most certainly can. a-z A-Z 0-9 and , . ? ! ; : - ' " ( ) should suffice in nearly all cases apart from anything hyper specialized. You could probably write the majority of all English literature with only those characters, and there's more characters I left off. What other characters are "widely used" in English texts that are missing from ASCII
- chrisseaton 7y agoHow do I write a letter to my fiancé? What do I do when I want to take a break and go to a café? How can I write about that cornerstone of English myth and legend, Bēowulf?
- nkrisc 7y agoPerhaps ASCII itself is to blame, but in my experience the first two spellings you list are less widely used than "fiance" and "cafe", respectively. I wouldn't base a paper on it, but (fiancé versus fiance): https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fianc%C3%A9%2Cfiance&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cfianc%C3%A9%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cfiance%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fianc%C3%A9%2C... café versus cafe: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=caf%C3%A9%2Ccafe&year_start=1840&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccaf%C3%A9%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccafe%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=caf%C3%A9%2Cca... I argue "Bēowulf" is does not fall under "widely used." Even my high school version of it it was printed "Beowulf." I'm not claiming "ASCII contains all characters used at all in English," just refuting the claim that you can't "write proper English" with ASCII and that it is missing "widely used" characters.
- big_chungus 7y agoYou write just like everyone normally writes, by dropping the accent. I only see such spellings when people are trying to convey some sort of sophistication, rather than in casual, day-to-day use.
- nkrisc 7y agoPrecisely. Even when writing by hand, where there are no character encoding limitations, I've never seen anyone add the accents to "fiance" or "cafe" or "resume" when writing in English.
- chrisseaton 7y ago> I've never seen anyone add the accents to "fiance" or "cafe" or "resume" when writing in English. We have café all the way from McDonalds up to Buckingham Palace. https://www.mcdonalds.com/gb/en-gb/menu/mccafe.html https://www.mcdonalds.com/gb/en-gb/menu/mccafe.html https://www.rct.uk/visit/the-state-rooms-buckingham-palace https://www.rct.uk/visit/the-state-rooms-buckingham-palace
- GrayShade 7y agoAmazon used to print my name with an HTML entity on the shipping labels. Buggy software is buggy. Saying "who cares about accents?" only sweeps the problem under the rug.