Not long ago, US Americans never worried about those funny little marks people sharing our alphabet place on some letters. Today, as our sophistication and knowledge of other cultures grow, we are paying more attention to them.
An ever-increasing number of newspapers and magazines (not only The New York Times or Time magazine) care about the proper spelling of nonEnglish words and about those funny little things on letters. (Yet, not even Time has been able to spell WaBsa (to pronounce vawensa) right with the Polish crossed L and the comma under the e — and neither could I with my Macintosh until system X came on if it were not for the symbol + kerning function of Microsoft Word at that time.)
How do other people see our ignoring their accents? Here’s how. “I fail to understand why North Americans are so careless about our ñ and our accents,” commented an Argentine sitting next to me on the plane headed for Buenos Aires. “The name of one of the ships that discovered America was La Niña, for goodness sake, with a very noticeable ñ in it,” he said.
I tried to explain to him “that English doesn’t have accents.”
“It doesn’t, huh? What are then those marks your dictionaries print to teach you how to pronounce a word?”
I counted 21 on-the-letter marks (long, short vowels, even umlauts, etc.) right there, in the American Heritage Dictionary he handed over to me. Then, he told me an interesting story about Spanish accents and American interference. “Your people damaged our language’s almost perfect system of graphic accents,” he concluded.
“It was your fault...”
“Mine?” I almost took it personally.
Contrary to English, Spanish is almost phonetic. This asset enormously facilitates its reading, especially when complemented by a perfect system of graphic accents. Phonetics and accents allow anyone to pronounce right any Spanish word without having to look it up in a dictionary — provided, of course, that the word in question was spelled and with the proper tilde.
As a consequence of our carelessness, presently, most Spanish-language newspapers and magazines skip the accents on upper case vowels. Such practice is now erroneously believed to be a grammatical rule. This absurd practice has lingered on into the computer world.
How did the American industry create this monster? By selling Linotypes (after their trademark) to Spanish speaking countries. These machines provided accents only on lower case vowels. We manufactured those symbols in order to print English phonetics. Now, since phonetics uses only lower case, our manufacturers never bother to create accented upper case vowels.
When their customers complained, rumor has it, manufacturers thought this complaint could be profitable. When Latin customers ordered accented upper case vowels, American suppliers charged extra for them, since they had to manufacture those letters from scratch.
Facing unwanted overhead costs, most Latin publishers, especially of small newspapers and magazines, stopped using accents on upper-case vowels. However, they bought upper-case Ñ’s, since their omission often lead to embarrassment (año means year; but ano means anus) or confusion (campaña means campaign; but campana means bell).
Now the computer messes up those funny little things on top of the letters again. We have been producing computers for quite a while, but until now, American printer and computer manufacturers haven’t been able to come up with at least one intelligent set of international accents. Despite the fact that it is extremely easy to create such a system.
When the American Standard Code for Information Interchange or ASCII was created, the provincial point of view prevailed over the fact that American computers had also a future in other countries. Consequently, its creators omitted any but the common English-keyboard symbols, as of a typewriter. This was a deplorable overlook, especially when within the ASCII there was plenty of room to include the most important symbols for almost all European languages.
Later adaptations like that of the Apple’s ImageWriter, for instance, an excellent, fast printer otherwise, fail to provide an intelligent set. ImageWriter allows the user with ñ and Ñ and ¡ and ¿, but what about the accent? “For the Spanish accent, you can use the apostrophe,” reads its manual.
The paradox of this instruction is that the accent must be placed on a vowel in Spanish, not next to it, as this printer prints it. Furthermore, the apostrophe doesn’t look like an accent.
To place the accent on the vowel, a backspace (control H) has to be entered through the word processor. This makes typing extremely difficult. Then add that the user doesn’t see the letters with accents on the screen. What he sees is a bunch of weird symbols, making editing and correction a real pain.
Macintosh system made it work. However, using the English keyboard, one must press three keys for an accent. (Option e-and a for a “á,” although it has the Macro function that allows keyboard layout changes. However, the default font lacked at the beginning important international symbols, as shown in Times, one font that has a complete set. This was corrected later.
MS Dos was limited. It too Windows, especially Windows 98, to produce a reasonably good international set.
For people in other countries where we export this system — this is serious. It affects their language directly and, since we are the manufacturers, we are accused of being careless and arrogant, acting in a sort of “I don’t give a damn” fashion — that is not necessarily true.
Let us put ourselves in their shoes to understand how upset they can get.
Imagine that our typewriters were manufactured in Brazil and they didn’t bother to adapt the keyboard to English. We would have to put up with not been able to type the letters y, w or k, since these letters are not used in Portuguese. Or, if one Brazilian company did finally include those three letters, they placed the upper case Y where the lower case y is supposed to be, and the lower case y where the upper case Y must go.
Funny, ah? You’d raise hell if they did that to you. Well, that is exactly what a lot of companies do to Latin American users when they export their systems, like ImageWriter, Epson, etc., with the ñ in upper case and the Ñ in lower case! Something that can drive anybody up the wall — unnecessarily. And then we ask ourselves “why do they misunderstand us?”
And going back to tradition, usage and all that. What about spelling of foreign, oops! names?