Random memory

[pne]

When I told my father about Esperanto, he thought it would be silly for a proposed International Auxiliary Language to require unusual diacritics, since that could only hinder its acceptance; using the straight Roman alphabet, with digraphs if necessary, would have made more sense to him.

(Interestingly enough, this was probably less of a problem back in the typewriter era, since you could put non-spacing diacritics such as circumflex accents over any letter you want… which is also, I believe, what accounts for the quaint single-vertical-line and double-vertical-line diacritics found in Marshallese: caused by overtyping an apostrophe or a quotation mark, respectively, over the vowel using a typewriter.)

Comments

[pne.livejournal.com]

it's the only language to use those two diacritics.

I suspected as much but wasn't sure.

IMHO, an IAL should use neither diacritics nor digraphs, and indeed ought not use letters of highly-variable pronunciation, unless all those pronunciations are acceptable variants within the language. An IAL should, indeed, strive for universality.

Sounds very sensible to me.