Talk:1647: Diacritics

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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Not quite sure if and how to inlcude the fact, that the German writing of résumé is Resümee. So the ü used by Cueball/Randall ist not that far off. However in German the word is not used for a CV (or similar), but for conclusions / abstracts. Elektrizikekswerk (talk) 10:19, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

I have included it. --Kynde (talk) 20:31, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
Thanks! Elektrizikekswerk (talk) 08:37, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
There is a newsgroup reading software called Forté Agent, which was popular in the past. It uses the same silly spelling as the title text. Might Randall be referring to it? http://www.forteinc.com/main/homepage.php -- Lou Crazy (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

OT but I'm pretty amazed that my browser renders ȩ̊́́́́̆.́́́ properly. 108.162.223.131 11:09, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

I doubt that Randall **forgets** to add the diacritics. My guess is that he is leaving it out due to habit or custom (or laziness), as accented characters often got mangled in emails at the Internet of yore. Just as some sysadmins here in .cz, me included. 141.101.95.49 11:35, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Well it fits with his error in hie what if that may explain this comic. It is no referenced, so I think he means that it is not his strength to put them right! --Kynde (talk) 20:31, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Might have a relation with changes officially added to school manuals regarding the spelling of many words in french (removal of many accents), in order to simplify it that sparked some debate (1990 paper from Académie française in charge of normalizing/perfecting french language pushed by government few weeks(months?) ago). Zurgul (talk) 11:47, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

The top accent on the last e can be a caron [1]. It is hard to tell in hand-written text. Jkotek (talk) 12:18, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

In phonetics, you have to use many diacritics when describing unusual sounds narrowly. So you could end up with something like [ë̯̰̙̹̃́], which is a slightly rounded, nasalised, centralised, creaky-voiced open short e with retracted tongue root that has a high tone but does not serve as a syllable nucleus. --162.158.91.222 13:32, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Forte means both loud and strong in both Italian and French --188.114.103.7 14:35, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

And also in music in English, so included that instead. --Kynde (talk) 20:31, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

When I first clicked on "explain xkcd" from Android app, I saw:

"@@@@@@@@ Pogo Game Technical Support Phone Number USA ------ ((((((((- - - - ------Call us on . . ." etc

I wondered whether it was part of the joke. But now I see that it is gone. I have a screenshot, but don't know how to include it. 108.162.238.83 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

We have had a lot of spam. (Link is to version you saw). --Kynde (talk) 20:31, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

This comic looks like a mild example of Zalgo text, of which the most famous example (at least in my corner of the universe) is the "don't parse html with regex" answer on StackOverflow. 173.245.54.53 17:42, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

I was just going to mention the Zalgo-iness. You think this was intentional? ~AgentMuffin


I have seen similar jokes on punctuation. Like: "I know Im not good at putting in any punctuation So here is some you can put in yourself ..........,,,,,,,,,,------------""""""""" ''''''''' " I sadly have it this way with commas especially (but not only) in English. I can see that when others have copy edited my posts. But I think that is the great thing about wikis. The hard part is making the explanations, and the others can easily correct spell erroers etc.  :-) --Kynde (talk) 20:31, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

I'm a French native speaker, and I think I need more explanation. In English, you only use diacritics with words from other languages, right ? I guess "Résumé" comes from French (even if we only say CV), and forte/forté comes from Italian, am I right ? Then WHY do you write "forté" on a music sheet when in France, and I think in Italy too, we write "forte" ? Thank you for your potential answers. Seipas (talk) 21:06, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

As an Italian mother tongue speaker, I removed the reference to "forté" as musical term, and marked it for verification on Wiktionary. --141.101.104.129 21:39, 24 February 2016 (UTC) (Gengis Gat)
The explanation used to have a bit about how English speakers confuse the French-derived word "forte", pronounced /fort/, and the Italian-derived musical term "forte", pronounced /fortay/, and come up with a neither-fish-nor-fowl spelling of forté, which is of course incorrect in all three languages. Note that you emphatically don't write "forté" on sheet music, or anywhere else for that matter, unless you're misspelling it. 173.245.54.53 22:46, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Just a note: In the transcript, the fancy ȩ̊́́́́̆ has one acute accent too much ;) (4 instead of 3)... 162.158.114.147 05:12, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

141.101.104.27 fixed this already. --Kynde (talk) 13:03, 25 February 2016 (UTC)