Sunday 5 October 2008

Squiggle shortage


When I lived in London I made several trips to Scandinavian countries.

I love it up there. Well in the summertime anyway!

What I really liked though, was the sheer number of accents, squiggles and other little diacritic symbols in the writing.

Norway, Sweden and Finland all have their own languages. But in print they all look kinda the same.

Using those little symbols has enabled the standard alphabet to be extended by several characters.

Same old letters. But a variety of additional uses for them.

Of course being a writer I'm also glad we don't have all these diacritic symbols in English.

I already waste enough time inserting annoying legal symbols like TM etc.

Mind you if we had as many symbols in English as there are in that poster perhaps the TM marks wouldn't look as bad.

Poster by Michael Ciancio.