Newsletter and Grammar Coach

Throughout the 31 years during which we’ve owned and operated EditPros, we’ve run across numerous special characters. One is named macron. Another is called tittle. We’re not talking the president of France or a San Francisco 49ers quarterback, but rather about typographical diacritics, also known as special characters.

Diacritics are symbols that are placed between, above, below or attached to letters. They indicate how words should be accented or pronounced, or they signal breaks between sets of double vowels. Those little marks are important to the extent that their omission can alter meaning. Such is the case with the Spanish-language tilde (~), with which año means “year,” but without which ano means “anus.” In some cases the combination of a letter with a diacritic is considered a distinct letter; for example the ñ character is called an eñe (pronounced EN-yay). A Spanish papá is a father, but a papa is a potato. In French, “la cote” is a shelter for animals, "la côte" is the sea coast, and "le côté" means side, aspect or direction. Diacritics are rare in native English-language words, but are seen in words and expressions assimilated from other languages — known as “loanwords.” Those include façade, résumé and déjà vu from French; and açai from Portuguese.

The English language discarded the diacritics in some loanwords such as “hotel” (borrowed from the French hôtel) and “elite” from élite. But diacritics are necessary to retain the meaning of some words that otherwise are spelled identically with other similar words that are distinctly different. Consider, for example: After lunch, Ed will resume updating his résumé.

The list of diacritical marks is long, but the ones familiar in Western languages include the acute accent (as in née), the left-slanting grave accent mark (` as in the name of the Sicilian city Cefalù), circumflex (the little caret-like mark in château), umlaut (two little dots, as in über), cedilla (the little tail resembling the figure "5" in façade to indicate a soft “c” sound), macron (a horizontal bar designating a long vowel sound, as in Māori) and the tittle (the dot above the lowercase i and j in the English language, and on other characters in other languages). The tittle sometimes is replaced by other characters, such as an acute accent, in certain words. The grave is used in some western European languages, including Italian, to indicate that a vowel should be stressed. It is in the Italian words città (city), più (more), Lunedì (Monday, as well as endings for other days of the week) and è (“is”). Without the grave accent, Italian e means “and.”

A usage note in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary points out that the German-language adjective schön (with an umlaut) means “beautiful,” but the adverb schon (without an umlaut) means “already.” While the umlaut is used over the letters ä, ö or ü to denote a change in meaning or pronunciation, the English language retains a similar-looking diacritic called a diaresis (also spelled diaeresis) that is used to signal a glottal stop before the second of two consecutive vowels. The diaresis is most seen in the word naïve to indicate a break between the vowels “a” and “i” for the proper pronunciation ny-EEV (rather than sliding them together, which would sound like “nyve.” A diaresis also retains proper pronunciation of Noël (no-EL) and the name Zoë (ZO-ee).

The Hawaiian version of the macron is called a kahakō, as seen over the “o” in the word ōlelo (which means “language”) and the word kahakō itself. Hawaiian and other Polynesian languages also use a glottal stop diacritical mark called the okina, which is an open single quote mark (resembling the numeral “6”), not a closing single quote mark (that resembles a “9”). The state of Hawai‘i and the University of Hawai‘i have adopted formal guidelines governing use of the okina and the kahakō. Note that an okina is not required for the adjective “Hawaiian.” Inclusion or omission of the okina can alter meaning. The Kona-Kohala Chamber of Commerce advises, for example, that the word kou means “your” while ko’u means “mine,” and moa refers to a chicken while mo’a means “cooked.” The Historic Hawai‘i Foundation notes the distinction between pau (which means “completed”) and paʻu (which means “soot”).

When using loanwords or foreign-language words in English-language text, retaining diacritics is always advisable, often essential and at the very least respectful. Diacritics are especially — well — critically important in preserving the proper spelling of the names of people, places and literary works. Word processing, spreadsheet and graphic design applications typically have provision for inserting the most common diacritical marks, although the methods may vary among software makers and operating platforms. The various specific methods are beyond the scope of this brief article, but instructions are easily attainable.

Fortunately, a comprehensive global digital standard called Unicode, established in the 1990s, encompasses more than 155,000 characters — letters, numerals, punctuation marks, diacritics, other symbols and pictorial emoji — in 168 language scripts (each of which contains symbols shared among multiple languages). The international Unicode Consortium has assigned a unique numerical binary code to each of those characters, for use in word processing, HTML encoding for websites and other forms of digital communication.

When we’re editing your documents, we’ll make sure that diacritics are properly preserved and represented. Think of us in that regard as your character witnesses.

As the years have passed in Yolo County, California, Pamela Kerlin has enjoyed spending time with her granddaughter and grandson and watching them grow up. But she always felt a tinge of sadness knowing that they didn’t have the opportunity to meet and get to know their great-grandparents and their grandfather — Pamela’s husband — all of whom died well before Pamela’s grandchildren were born.

“Sometimes, when I first lie down at night, thoughts from years ago arise,” Pamela mused. “One night an earthy scent of spring air and garden soil brought me back to many years ago when my family was getting ready to take one of our spring trips to Texas. I could see Mom’s yellow peace rose from her garden with its tinge of pink,” she said wistfully. “Other times, if I hear the classical Symphonie Espagnole by the composer Lalo, or Corelli’s Christmas Concerto on my radio, my heart is right there with my dad, as he loved those beautiful pieces of music. And always, every time I see a sailboat off in the distance on the ocean, I think of him and how much he would love to be out there on it.”

She wanted to preserve and share those and other recollections in a way that would be memorable for her grandchildren. That's when she conceived the idea of documenting stories about them in book form. She began methodically compiling notes, which became the fabric from which she wove together her book For My Grandchildren: A Journal of Love that she produced with the help of EditPros' BookPrep service.

She described the book as “a journal of loving memories” about her husband and her parents — the children’s great-grandparents. Pamela also included some narrative about her own life in the years before her grandchildren were born.

“My hope is that this collection of some of these life experiences will bring enjoyment to your reading and an enrichment of your knowledge of family,” she wrote in a dedication to her grandchildren.

Although Pamela intentionally has not made the book available for sale to the public, she is able to purchase as many copies as she wants at the wholesale price, to give to family members and friends. This is the 63rd book that Book Prep has produced for authors during the past six years.

For authors who do want to make their books available commercially in both print and digital editions, EditPros formats and converts the book files into e-book formats for sale through Amazon (Kindle), Apple (iBooks), Barnes & Noble (Nook), and Kobo, by means of submission to IngramSpark's e-book service.

As part of the BookPrep package, EditPros professionally formatted the cover and interior pages of For My Grandchildren: A Journal of Love, and readied it for print publication.

With BookPrep, authors retain all rights to their books, and collect 100 percent of sales royalties.

We invite you to LEARN MORE about the EditPros BookPrep service.

Terry Z. wrote:

“During a discussion about the weather and TV meteorologists, a friend of mine insisted that ‘forecasted’ is the proper past tense of the verb ‘forecast’ but I disagreed. I think it’s ‘forecast’ as in ‘last week he forecast rain but it remained dry here.’ What do you think?”

The grammar coach replies:

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