I thought the word and the definition sounded beautiful, but then I also learned that it was coined in 2017 and has been accused of imposing outside culture. Namely, here is a criticism I found on Twitter and Reddit but without further attribution or detail:
Just wanted to share and see what the community thought about it.
I find it hard to blame people for bad use of characters that they don’t have on their keyboard layouts. I’m French speaking, I don’t care if you’re not putting an accent on “échelle” when writing to me in a casual conversation, I understand you mean “ladder” when you write “echelle”.
Edit: Makes me think, I myself am often just working on something with the US layout at the same time as communicating in French, and not wanting to juggle between layouts, I just skip accents.
In Scandinavian languages, åäöæø are not even accents. They’re completely separate letters. And substitutions can lead to entirely different words. It still used to be common to see ao used instead when a lot of systems had problems with anything other than 7bit ASCII. (Mostly Microsoft, of course.)
On the other hand there were things like TV shows where names might be transliterated, so Pääkkönen might become paeaekkoenen which is text gore, but might have some chance of getting pronounced remotely right.
Oh and the generally “funny” feature especially in dumb phones where the so called Microsoft alphabetical order would put ä first in a list instead of nearly last.
It seems like a poor latinization system to use the same characters used for accented letters to represent those different letters
Blame some monks from the dark ages
I understand, but I also don’t have å or ø in my language, so my mental mapping is gonna be “a” and “o”.
Thank you, I appreciate this as someone who speaks two languages of which neither has accents.
Edit: I’m sorry, you guys, I just realized my fucking native tongue has some rarely used accents. I am not a smart woman. And I agree that if someone omitted them, I would still understand what they meant.
Even English has a handful of words with accents. “Naïve” comes to mind. Of course, most people ignore those accents.
IIRC the diaeresis is actually optional and “naive” is actually okay too. Technically even “cooperative” initially took one on the second O.
This is probably not relevant, but if you use Gboard on your Android device, you can long press for accents e.g. Pokémon
Actually relevant. As long as you know the accents exist at all in those words. For me it’s hard to remember them, especially in foreign languages I don’t speak, I kind of remember the “phonetic” version in my language, if it makes sense. Sometimes we have common accents that do different things to letters or words. Other times it’s just like nothing I’ve ever seen, so I have no idea how it’s pronounced or what it is.
So many times I wanted to talk about ‘el año’, and instead wrote ‘el ano’. 😣
(Spanish. ‘the year’ vs ‘the anus’)
I’m German myself but since I am a programmer I like the US-Keyboard more than the German one. The easy fix for me was using US-intl-nodeadkeys so I can use the right alt key to type those stupid German umlauts. This should work at least for most (Western-)European languages.
Maori here, two things to to put into the arguement.
1, Maori language does not directly translate word to word. One of my kids name translated directly to English is “destroyer of houses”, however the meaning behind it is a guardian and protector. Kura urupare may translate directly as gift inside head, but there is likely deeper meaning - im unfortunately not fully vursed in the meaning of this one.
2, the Maori language is dying - if people want to use a word that works for them, provides understanding and expression or brings it into common use then go hard. Use it as much as you can, fuck the purists.
One of my kids name translated directly to English is “destroyer of houses”
In my experience, this describes children perfectly lol
Thanks for the insights. Languages that contain a lot of metaphor in everyday speech are really interesting.
One of my kids name translated directly to English is “destroyer of houses”…
lol 🤣🤣🤣… well, I’m sure some nice construction worker lady will make a great wife 🤣🤣🤣
