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]

Zamenhof did foresee the problems with the diacritics, though. The Fundamento says:
"If it be found impraticable to print works with the diacritical signs (^,˘), the letter h may be substituted for the sign (^), and the sign (˘), may be altogether omitted."

That does lead to ambiguity (the classical example being flughaveno which is not fluĝaveno), though, which goes against one of the (assumed) goals of the language (viz. unambiguous sound-to-symbol and symbol-to-sound correspondences).

Incidentally, I wonder what would have happened if Esperanto had arisen nowadays; I think it would have had a much harder time to get its special letters into any computer character set. It's lucky to have official support in iso-8859-3 and, later, Unicode, presumably only because it had (a) been around for quite a while when computer character sets were drawn up and (b) was moderately important.

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

"(the classical example being flughaveno which is not fluĝaveno)"

This is the reason why I disagree with your father and with the creators of Ido on whether it's good for an IAL to have digraphs (unless of course they are unambiguous, for example, if one letter of the diagraph is never used on its own).