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]

Oh, and I'd pronounce |an ß| as /@n Es-tsEt/, since that's the name I give it in my native German; other Germans, though call it a "scharfes S". No consensus even within the language! :)