Yup. Also, I would just like to add, and this comment is going to smell a bit, it seems this nostalgia for keeping diacritics in borrowed words - even when they've been on loan for hundreds of years and our own words are long lost - applies really only to French words. Now, I am speaking purely from an anglophone POV. I have no idea what other languages do with the diacritics of words they borrow. I am speaking only from within the Native-English-Speaking paradigm. I see no one ever go out of their way or make an affectation of correctly marking Spanish surnames with appropriate diacritics. Hernández, Vázquez, Vélez, Pérez, Domínguez, etc. And given the U.S.'s close acquaintance with the Spanish speaking world, to include Hispanics now as the largest single minority within the U.S., I find this strange. Thankfully, my own Spanish surname, Fuentes, does not take a diacritic, else I would have spent my life dealing with that little bugger, or its lack thereof, as the case would be. This deference to French as regards this matter feels like a very polyester, 1950's-1970's remnant cultural artifact. I remember as a kid in the 70's, already secure in the knowledge that I wanted to be an interpreter, that at that time the lingua franca of the U.N. was still French, though the lingua franca of the business world had long ago switched to English as the language of money. Yup. Big difference in meaning, but as has been mentioned many times already in this thread, in English we are perfectly accustomed to a particular grouping of letters (a word) having numerous different pronunciations depending on context. This is not a rare situation. It happens all over the place, twenty times in a printed page. Such is the nature of English. It happens in our own, Anglo-Saxon rooted words. We don't even need to reach out to borrowings to see the phenomenon take place. So, there cannot really be an argument for the cruciality of the é in exposé (as opposed to expose),when context would make it clear 100% of the time since one is a noun and the other is a verb and the syntactic structures that would proceed the respective parts of speech would be completely distinct and unless we are willing to completely revamp the entire language from Letter A on forwards because I see no one arguing that we should delete the utterly misleading K from knife. There is no such word as nife already in play, so it's not like it would cause confusion in meaning the way the same K-deletion might cause with the equally misleading knight. And here's the part that's really going to smell, I say this because any language's orthography should be designed to be used by its native speakers. I would never consider asking Japanese The Language to romanize itself for my personal ease of use. I've chatted with our two Finnish mods (@KaTrian & @T.Trian) concerning the astounding (in my eyes) number of diacritics in their remarkably polysyllabic language. The English speaker in me has to bite my tongue and not speak the thought: Come on, you can't tell me you need all of that. Some of that has to be superfluous. And I think this thought because I see the written version of their language and it looks daunting to me, a trained professional interpreter. But the simple fact is that Finnish is not, and should not be, designed for little Puerto Rican dudes trying to make their way in the world as interpreters. It should be designed for Finns to use in their everyday lives. </rant>
Hungarians simply get rid of them (in case the same letter does not exists in Hungarian). The same applies to combinations of letters which can be replaced by one and letters which are not pronounced (so "telephone" becomes "telefon" for example) Often the word is changed to allow better pronunciation : "Récamière" becomes "rekamé". Hungarian is similar (actually it shares the same origins with the Finnish) and not to mention the several double letters which are considered as one (and included in the Hungarian alphabet) like "ly", "sz", "ny" and so on. But you are right, for natives the use of these is natural and seems logical. It's not necessarily logical, though.
Yes, Spanish (Castellano) does the same. Spanish has a rigidly phonetic spelling system that does not cater to "historic spelling" for the sake of maintaining some phylogenetic lineage system for borrowed words, though to be frank, Spanish, like most of the Romance Languages tends to be hostile towards the use of borrowed words, at least at an official level. At the proletariat level, borrowings are everywhere used and often supplant original Spanish words. Yes. The Finno-Ugric Family.
Haha, yeah, if you drop them, things get very confusing so unfortunately they are needed. E.g. kähmiä = to steal, kahmia = to hoarde. I have a few rude examples too, but this is a nice forum, so maybe I'll leave them out.
