A side effect of what Vittorio explains is that many Italians, even among the non-uneducated, often write “è” (third person of the verb “essere”, i.e. “to be”) as é. So even now that keyboards have the accented vowels quite a lot of people get it wrong - and I fear that this trend is by now irreversible.

R.


On 20.09.2021, at 15:30, Vittorio Bertola via UA-discuss <ua-discuss@icann.org> wrote:


Il 20/09/2021 14:41 Michele Neylon - Blacknight via UA-discuss <ua-discuss@icann.org> ha scritto:


You’d think we’d have this already, but oddly we don’t:

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/irish-fadato-get-legal-protection-and-must-appear-in-all-state-it-systems-and-computer-keyboards-40631034.html

That would be good, but even having the key on the keyboard and the right default charset in the operating system is still not enough. In our Italian experience, today you still find many public offices and private companies (or bad programmers working for them) that require the use of alternative ASCII spellings, such as the unaccented vowel followed by an apostrophe, for "compatibility reasons". We even have the well known triplet da, dà and da' which all sound the same but all mean something different, so it's clear that sometimes the ASCII substitution can actually alter the meaning, but still people learned to write e' in place of è on their first computer in the 90's, and stick to that.

-- 

Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
vittorio.bertola@open-xchange.com 
Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy
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