Ar 12:17 -0700 1999-07-20, scríobh A. Vine:
>Unaccented spellings of these and many many other words borrowed from other
>Latin alphabet based languages are perfectly correct in English.
"Façade" can only be pronounced /fa'sa:d/. "Facade" could be pronounced
/fa'keid/. The latter is not to be preferred, any more than "nite" should
be preferred to "night".
>I just looked
>up those 3 examples in Webster's New Riverside for further confirmation
>and the
>unaccented versions are listed as proper spellings.
Of course "if it's in the dictionary it's gospel" in North America. (Not
being nasty here; it's a part of the culture arising in part from a deep
desire in the last century for immigrants to use "correct" English.
>English speakers do not have accents as part of their native alphabet.
>We adapt other language spellings as necessary - for Latin character
>based languages, this means dropping the accents/diacritics, for other
>character sets this means transliteration.
Naturalized borrowings are native words. "Façade" and "naïve" and "déjà vu"
are English words, and one knows them to be naturalized as they are not
italicized in print. Thus these characters are part of standard English
orthography, O my belovèds.
Stodgily,
-- Michael Everson * Everson Gunn Teoranta * http://www.indigo.ie/egt 15 Port Chaeimhghein Íochtarach; Baile Átha Cliath 2; Éire/Ireland Guthán: +353 1 478 2597 ** Facsa: +353 1 478 2597 (by arrangement) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn; Baile an Bhóthair; Co. Átha Cliath; Éire
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