Motörhead, Häagen-Dazs, and Yöu

By Geoffrey Pullum. Like many Lingua Franca readers, I spend some of my life in airports, which has undoubtedly given me a skewed view of language. Be that as it may, I’ve been particularly struck this autumn by what seems to be the rise of the reckless diacritical.
I’m not a linguist, as readers of this blog will know. I won’t delve into the historical arcana of diacritical marks, except to say that they seem to have been necessities of writing since antiquity, as if alphabetic language itself were born in need of a little help. More...