Re: Accents (in U2)

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

"The legal letters that accept a macron are:
      A a D d E e I i L l N n S s T t U u"
N macron is "legal," but o macron is not? Who decided what is "legal"?
We've seen that o macron is needed for transcriptions of Korean and
Japanese, and also for classical Latin grammars. But n or t macron? I
won't try to prove a negative. Maybe they're used in Old High Ruritanian
or Middle Outer Impish, but... (Not your fault, you're stuck with it same
as the rest of us, but who dreams up these things?)
"The native XyWrite way, accent first, then character, is
stupid: who, in all of history, has ever written an accent first, then
the character to be accented?" No one, of course (not even
split-brain-dominant klutzes like me). But the Windows "U.S.
International" (surely a contradiction in terms?) keyboard does it too,
will-ye-nill-ye. So I will probably perforce use it here too, to avoid
switching mental and manual gears.
"It makes little sense if your primary is English." To load the whole
megillah, yes. But I DO use grave, circumflex, and acute almost any and
every day. After all, lots of English words still have acutes: cliché,
résumé, café; and who knows when I might want to menion the Côte d'Azur
or Molière?
Yes, the accents were always there, but I needed an impetus to go to the
trouble of making the keyboard assignments. Between this and the
inability to enter number-pad numbers (which was how I always did it,
with a cheatsheet handy) on the laptop without a lot of hassle, I finally
got it. And yes, I know I should have loaded the whole program to a key,
but as I knew I would want to load the individual accents to keys, I put
it off. Should have realized that was why I was getting them on the CML
though.
Patricia