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Some sources distinguish "diacritical marks" (marks upon standard letters in the A–Z 26-letter alphabet) from "special characters" (letters not marked but radically modified from the standard 26-letter alphabet) such as Old English and Icelandic eth (Ð, ð) and thorn (uppercase Þ, lowercase þ), and ligatures such as Latin and Anglo-Saxon Æ (minuscule: æ), and German eszett (ß; final ...
English orthography comprises the set of rules used when writing the English language, [1] [2] allowing readers and writers to associate written graphemes with the sounds of spoken English, as well as other features of the language. [3] English's orthography includes norms for spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation, word breaks, emphasis, and ...
This is however not the way the English language works: The English language is not completely diacritic free, examples: provençal, château, piñata; Some words can be used interchangeably with or without accent, example: café or cafe; Some words have a different meaning when used with or without accent, example: canon vs. cañon (=canyon);
Most phonemes in English can be spelled in more than one way. E.g. the words f ea r and p ee r contain the same sound in different spellings. Likewise, many graphemes in English have multiple pronunciations and decodings, such as ough in words like thr ough, th ough, th ough t, thor ough, t ough, tr ough, and pl ough.
Swedish also has the letters å, ä, and ö, but these are considered distinct letters, not a and o with diacritics. Tamil does not have any diacritics in itself, but uses the Arabic numerals 2, 3 and 4 as diacritics to represent aspirated, voiced, and voiced-aspirated consonants when Tamil script is used to write long passages in Sanskrit.
Whenever the most common spelling in English-language reliable sources is the person's real name, or the name with the diacritical marks simply omitted, the proper name (with the diacritics) is normally used. Exceptions include some historical persons (as foreign personal names were often anglicized in the past) and naturalized citizens who ...
Other sources use them to a greater or lesser extent (see below). many people feel that correct spelling of names of people and places whose origins are 'non-English' is a matter of precision and respect to the person or country of their origin; a word with the diacritics may mean something utterly different in its absence; others are confused ...
In such cases, as with personal names, the proper diacritics should be used, when there is no technical problem with that. That some English-speakers have problems writing foreign diacritics is not an argument for placing these subjects under the wrong heading, but for creating redirects or disambiguation pages when necessary.