3 ms·
The alternate question is "why are these 26 characters the American English alphabet?" It's fairly arbitrary, a collection of historical accidents and changes i
by NelsonMinar 3y ago
The alternate question is "why are these 26 characters the American English alphabet?" It's fairly arbitrary, a collection of historical accidents and changes in orthography.
And it's incomplete. You can't really write American English with just the usual 26 letters. Ñ and the ʻokina are proper letters and necessary for writing a bunch of American words correctly. The various kahakō are helpful too but they are treated as diacritics and not full fledged separate letters.
- mcv 3y agoNot just American English; lots of countries use the same alphabet. Even countries that have more characters than these 26, still often consider these 26 to be their alphabet. Weirder still: we often call it the Latin alphabet, but Latin never had some of these characters. No 'j', 'u' or 'w' in Latin, for example.
- School-Cotton 3y ago> Ñ and the ʻokina are proper letters and necessary for writing a bunch of American words correctly Depends what you mean by “correctly”, but in practice they’re not necessary to write American English, and most people don’t use them (except in very high-production-value writing, like professionally edited books and magazines).
- NelsonMinar 3y agoTell that to the people who live in Española, NM; the official name of the city includes the ñ. Or Hawaiʻi, although for the latter "Hawaii" is at least correct from an official government placename perspective.
- permo-w 3y agoat a push, you can transliterate ñ as ny or ni, or even use the Portuguese nh if you really want to push the boat out, but when an ñ isn't available, most people seem to just drop it entirely and let you figure it out from context