User:OpenFuture/Diacritics in article names

There has been an long debate on whether to use Diacritics in article names, and this is my summary and view on the matter. This text is split into several parts, first countering common misconceptions, secondly establishing the actual facts, thirdly summarizing the arguments from the different sides and lastly drawing conclusions.

Diacritics not are modifiers/special/optional
Because diacritics are optional in English, Anglophones often assume this is the same in other languages. Quite often it is. You are for example allowed to skip the accents on French vowels if they are uppercase. Hence you should always write "étudiant" (student), but it is acceptable to write either Étudiant or Etudiant. But many diacritics in many languages are not modifiers or optional, but the accented signs are letters in their own right, and handled as separate letters. Hence Swedish has three letters based on the same character, "A", "Ä" and Å". These are not variations, nor special characters, but are all equal members of the Swedish alphabet. The same goes for Polish "Z", "Ź" and "Ż".

In Sweden a story is told about the first IBM PC which illustrates this. The story goes that the head of IBM in Sweden got very excited when he heard that IBM had a project to create a personal computer. He thought this was a good idea, but he knew that other brands of personal computers generally had problems with the Swedish characters, and that an IBM personal computer would have a very tough time competing with the wildly popular Swedish ABC-series of computers, that of course had no such problems. He therefore wrote to the head of the PC project to make sure that Swedish characters was included. The response was that they didn't care about "special characters". The head of IBM Sweden then wrete a leng letter back expleining thet it wesn't speciel cherecters, and ellestreteng thes by greeduelly repleceng ell vewels weth the vewel e, mekeng the letter herder end herder te reed. The PC project got the message, and as a result the Swedish characters was included in the default codepage of the IBM PC, while for example the Danish and Norwegian Æ and Ø is not.

Stripping diacritics are in many languages no different from replacing an O with an E in English.

Stripping diacritics does not make it English
This argument is often repeated, and it astonishes me. A word or name does not become English because you only use A-Z to spell it. The Swedish word "fartyg" uses no diacritics, but it's not English. It's still Swedish, and means "ship". In the same way, the word "öra" does not become English because you strip the diacritics and make it "ora". In fact in that case it's neither English nor Swedish, but gibberish. To make it English, you have to translate it. It means "ear". The same thing does with names. "Björn Borg" is not made into English by stripping the diacritics. "Bjorn" is just gibberish, not English. If you want to make "Björn Borg" English you again have to translate it, into "Bear Fortress". Translations of names like that are not unheard of, and of course, many famous native american names are translated like that. It does have the benefit of making it easy to pronounce for the Anglophone, a benefit that stripping the diacritics doesn't have. It doesn't help you pronounce it correctly, in fact it takes away the information that helps people who know how to pronounce Swedish so they can't pronounce it correctly either.

English has diacritics too
Not true. Café and coöperation are just two words where diacritics can be used. But, as noted above, the are really optional in English. But claiming that they are not used and not English is incorrect.

Diacritics aren't easier if you are multilingual
This argument tries to say that the poor Anglophones who don't speak many languages are distracted by diacritics and find them hard, while us international people who speak many languages find it easier to mentally "strip" the word of the diacritics. It is of course exactly the other way around, because diacritics are pronounced differently in different languages. If you don't speak any language with umlauts, Björn just has some weird dots, and since you don't know how to pronounce them, you'll just ignore them, and pronounce the name Bjoooorn (while the correct is closer to Bjern). Similarily, I as Swedish tend to just ignore the diacritics in Slovak, since I don't know how to pronounce them. I don't know how the diacritics in Ľubomír Višňovský modifies the sound, so I just don't modify them.

However, if you do know Swedish and you encounter words like coöperation, you'll tend to mispronounce them. Instead of coh-operation, in my head that becomes coh-eperation. That's very distracting. So the idea that it becomes easier to ignore diacritics the more you know about them is completely wrong. It gets harder. The only way out of that would be to learn how to prnounce every letter for every language, something I suspect is not humanly possible. Ignorance may not be bliss, but it certainly makes things easier in this case.

Nouns, proper nouns and personal names
The conflict about diacritics are not about nouns in general, but about proper names, and more specifically personal names. Nobody claims we should have a Fartyg article. The english word for "fartyg" is Ship so that's what the article is about. It does get more complex with names of places and other proper nouns. But nobody wants the article on Icelandic language to be moved to íslenska. Likewise the article is Munich not München. This is because these proper nouns have common names in English. But most personal names do not. There are exceptions, but most persons in history just isn't well known enough to have entered the English vocabulary in any meaningful sense.

Different names vs Different spellings
The WP:COMMONNAME policy decide what name an article should have. Briefly, it should use the "common" name of whatever is used. That means Sweden, not Kingdom of Sweden; Ringo Starr, not Richard Starkey; and Barack Obama, not Barack Hussein Obama II. There is no discussion or conflict about this, everyone agrees. We should use the common name, according to WP:COMMONNAME. The conflict here is about the *spelling* of that name.

Björn Borg and Bjorn Borg is the same name, but different spellings. We all agree that this is the name to use, and not Björn Rune Borg or Bear Fortress. But we can't agree on how to spell it, namely to spell it with an "o" or an "ö"