These arguments are double-edged. There is sloppiness and there is
sloppiness. My last name is structurally similar to that of Ken Litkowski,
and yet he is (most likely) a native speaker of English, I am not. Will
native speakers of English stand my sloppiness? Harold Somers' attitude
shows some of them will not, if I used 'corpi', or 'corpus are', or 'corpora
is'. Whatever. Well, actually, I think I might err rather by being
hypercorrect than otherwise. No split infinitives for me... But even my
non-native self looks with a patronizing (?), pitying (?), hurt(?) attitude
at some of the mail here.... and there. Should you (native speakers of
English) /we (members of this list) struggle with the form, hoping the
contents will be illuminating? Or -- the dustbin?
But in fact I wanted to report on an interesting type of sloppiness in a
language with diacritics. Polish has nine diacritics, or eighteen, when
capital letters are counted separately. The point is that very few people
bother about diacritics in e-mails, they use what is sometimes called pidgin
Polish: only the Latin (or English) characters are used. (You have to press
two keys at the same time when you want to use diacritics, you press one
when you do not. Economy of language...).
A very (VERY) careful writer will use diacritics, or you can tell somebody
was writing offline seeing diacritics in his/her mail. In fact, we have a
nice gradation: a proper letter with diacritics, a proper letter without
diacritics, a casual letter, etc. This device tells you a lot about the
speaker(?)/writer.
I wonder what do the people do with other diacritic-rich languages? German?
French? Czech? Is it the same as in Polish?
Regards
Tadeusz Piotrowski
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mailing address
Department of English
Opole University Chrobrego 20
Oleska 48 PL-55-020 Zorawina (Zórawina)
Opole
POLAND
phone/fax (+48)71-3165847
mobile (+48)607159263
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