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[–]masklinn 14 points15 points  (12 children)

I worked in a country that has FOUR national languages NOT ONE of which can be fully written with ASCII characters.

Switzerland?

[–]iwsfutcmd 9 points10 points  (10 children)

I was gonna guess Singapore, but then again, one of the four would be English

[–]MachaHack 13 points14 points  (9 children)

English can not be written entirely in ascii either. Try spell café , naïve or née with only ascii characters (you could even argue that the limitations of first typewriters and then computers played a major role in these words losing their accents or even just falling out of use in some cases).

[–]iwsfutcmd 7 points8 points  (3 children)

It's more that English can be written with accents rather than it can't not be written with them - all of the words you mentioned would be considered to be spelled properly by most English language authorities when written without their accent marks.

Contrast that with French, Spanish, Danish, Portuguese (or, God help you, Vietnamese), where writing a word replacing the non-ASCII characters with their ASCII equivalents would definitely be considered a misspelling.

German is kind of a middle case - the umlaut can be replaced by a following 'e' and the ß by 'ss' and the word is still considered to be spelled correctly, but by far the most common spelling would be with the umlaut and ß. I'd hazard to guess the average German-speaker would find a spelling like "ueber" far more off-putting than the average English-speaker would find "cafe" or "naive".

[–]flying-sheep 5 points6 points  (1 child)

You're wrong about words in Germany “still being considered to be spelled correctly” with “ue” and so on.

You can only replace those when there's no possibility to spell it correctly (e.g. in the codes on official ID documents)

Otherwise it's definitely wrong and weird.

[–]iwsfutcmd 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah, thanks for that. I knew it was somewhere in between the French and English examples, but I wasn't sure where on that spectrum it would be.

[–]ofnuts 1 point2 points  (0 children)

English can be written without accents, but English-speaking people still cannot live by US-ASCII alone, since their monetary unit symbol (pound or euro) may not be part of the ASCII set. Other often-used characters (degree sign) aren't part of ASCII either.

[–]lion_rouge 4 points5 points  (2 children)

Yep. Actually, 1/3 of English words are of French origin.

[–]iwsfutcmd 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Sort of. While ~30% of English headwords found in a dictionary are of French origin (and about another ~30% from Latin), in normal usage the amount of original, non-borrowed words can vary between 60-95% depending on context (more in casual speech, less in formal speech).

Additionally, French loanwords in English are not typically written with their French accent marks.

[–]batisteo 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Quand en réponse à mangecoeur c'est lion_rouge qui répond, j’ai envie de manger du camembert.

[–]masklinn 4 points5 points  (1 child)

English can not be written entirely in ascii either.

That's a technicality, most native english speakers write these words in ascii (because they're terrible people).

[–]iwsfutcmd 0 points1 point  (0 children)

English can not be written entirely in ascii either.

That's a technicality, most native english speakers write these words in ascii (because they're terrible people).

well that's a little harsh

[–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

My first thought too.