NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: long s character in old text
From: Peter Hakel
Date: 2010 Jan 2, 22:44 -0800
From: Thomas Kleemann
To: NavList@fer3..com
Sent: Fri, January 1, 2010 7:48:38 AM
Subject: [NavList] Re: long s character in old text
As we are already on this topic: What's about accents? That little dots and dashes above and below letters in French, German and other languages like Czech?
Should we use transliterations, unicode or do we just omitt t hem?
Example:
Ångström,
Freiberger Präzisionsmechanik
By the way, German knows a long s too. Its todays use is within the ligature "ß", which is originally just a "s" and a "z". But its transliteration is usually "ss".
Happy new year,
Thomas.
From: Peter Hakel
Date: 2010 Jan 2, 22:44 -0800
I am a native Slovak speaker with a good knowledge of Czech. Both of these languages use the Roman alphabet augmented by diacritic symbols or "accents." Unlike German (where ü=ue, etc.) we have no rules to explicitly indicate the unavailable diacritics. Unicode is preferable; but if only ASCII is available, we simply omit the diacritics. For native speakers this poses no problem, anything else is actually detrimental to readability, so less is more in this case.
I was typing this while watching the Philadelphia-Boston hockey game. The last name of the Boston captain Zdeno Chára is in fact pronounced "Khaara" (German/Czech/Slovak "ch" = English "kh" = Russian "x") with the first "a" long. A rare case of confusion occurred years ago when another Slovak hockey player Miroslav Satan became internationally known. His last name was a source of some amusement, which had never occurred to us natives, because his last name evokes the word "clothing" rather than the "devil." :-)
Happy New Year to all and my thanks to Frank for maintaining this list.
Peter Hakel
(no diacritics)
I was typing this while watching the Philadelphia-Boston hockey game. The last name of the Boston captain Zdeno Chára is in fact pronounced "Khaara" (German/Czech/Slovak "ch" = English "kh" = Russian "x") with the first "a" long. A rare case of confusion occurred years ago when another Slovak hockey player Miroslav Satan became internationally known. His last name was a source of some amusement, which had never occurred to us natives, because his last name evokes the word "clothing" rather than the "devil." :-)
Happy New Year to all and my thanks to Frank for maintaining this list.
Peter Hakel
(no diacritics)
From: Thomas Kleemann
To: NavList@fer3..com
Sent: Fri, January 1, 2010 7:48:38 AM
Subject: [NavList] Re: long s character in old text
As we are already on this topic: What's about accents? That little dots and dashes above and below letters in French, German and other languages like Czech?
Should we use transliterations, unicode or do we just omitt t hem?
Example:
Ångström,
Freiberger Präzisionsmechanik
By the way, German knows a long s too. Its todays use is within the ligature "ß", which is originally just a "s" and a "z". But its transliteration is usually "ss".
Happy new year,
Thomas.
