No respect
In the Writer's Almanac today they celebrate the birthday of Will Shortz, and end with this:
Here are a couple of the many brain-teasers that Will Shortz has come up with:Sigh.
1) What part of the body can be spelled by rearranging the letters of the word "ELATION"?
2) Change one letter of the word SHUFFLE to make something to eat.
1) Answer: Toenail
2) Answer: Soufflé
I could have accepted it if they hadn't printed the accent. But they did. Diacritics are not there to make the page look prettier. E and É are not same letter.
5 Comments:
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At 12:47 PM, August 26, 2009
Barry Leiba had this to say...
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At 1:06 PM, August 26, 2009
The Ridger, FCD had this to say...
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At 1:52 PM, August 26, 2009
Barry Leiba had this to say...
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At 2:01 PM, August 26, 2009
The Ridger, FCD had this to say...
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At 5:10 PM, August 26, 2009
Barry Leiba had this to say...
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<-- Older Post ^ Home Newer Post -->Actually, that's not true. The accent mark (in this case, the accent acute) is required, but is not considered to create an different letter. French has one letter between "d" and "f", designated as "e". The four variations (e, é, è, and ê) differ in orthography and pronunciation, but aren't different letters.
The same is true for accents in Spanish (where the accent mark alters the default syllable stress (and sometimes (as with "si" and "sí") the meaning)) and for umlauted vowels in German. But in Spanish, "ch", "ll", "ñ", and "rr" are different letters, and in Swedish, "å", "ä", and "ö" are also different letters.
It all depends upon the convention of the language. To complicate matters, even though the French don't consider "e" and "é" to be distinct letters, they are collated differently, while in German, "a" and "ä" are not (they're intermixed in collation).
Hey, if they're collated differently, how can they not be different letters?
Well, in the Spanish example I gave, you have to have some convention for how "si" and "sí" sort, relative to each other. That, in itself doesn't make them different letters.
In French, the following collation sequence applies, for example:
feston
fête
fétide
feu
If those three "e"s were different letters, "feu" would be next to "feston".
Well, the French instructor here was ranting yesterday about first-year students who couldn't be bothered to write the accent marks. So maybe they aren't "letters" but words that need them are misspelled without them...
Oh, yes, absolutely: they're part of correct spelling (as in Spanish and German). That's why I said they're required. Sometimes their presence or absence changes the meaning of the word, changes the pronunciation, whatever. You're certainly right that they're not just decoration.
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