this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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I think keyboards really affect our usage of accent marks. It's a lot easier to type without the accent. Especially on a physical (English QWERTY at least) keyboard there's no way to type the accents other than remembering the alt codes. Touch screen keyboards definitely help by making it pretty easy, but I think the largest effect would come from autocorrect changing it by default. I think there's also a bit of a stigma that makes going out of your way to use the proper accent seem "pretentious", which autocorrect would also help with.
You don't need to use alt codes.
ãâäåáà, êëéè, îïíì, õôöòø, ûüúù, æ, þð, ñ, ýÿ, ç
Behold, you can type all these and probably a few more by just combining two keys or in some cases three (a little more annoying than capitalizing) and using the English United States International Keyboard layout on a Microsoft keyboard... And how do you think French people write in French? They have to procure diacritics as well. The input is basically the same as how I do it, except their physical keyboards also have the markings on them so you don't need to memorize it all in your head.
https://www.starr.net/is/type/intlchart.html
Literally all Microsoft has to do is extend this keyboard layout and it would be able to handle more languages.
edit: why is this a video lmao
Also it's already bad enough figuring out a Chinese word with just the pinyin. If you're not even given tones then there could be dozens of meanings.
That's not the default layout for most and it causes trouble when wanting to use those symbols on their own, which would be much more often than typing diacritics.
Okay sorry, let me clarify something. It's okay for the layperson to omit accents. My issue is that it's considered acceptable in government papers, academic articles, books, etc.