Ask LJ.... Geogralinguistics division

[rhu]

Are there any places within the United States whose name is properly spelled with an accent or diacritic? I need an example to demonstrate a point I'm trying to make, and so far my best example is Montréal; my argument would be stronger if the place in question was in the United States and not just North America. The more populous the place, the better.

Comments

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia has a brief list.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Thanks. Shoulda thought of that.

Alas, the only one on that list that would bolster my argument is San José, which is the place where the person with whom I'm having the disagreement is located, but which no longer uses that spelling.

Oh, well.

[bookishfellow.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_diacritics

[bookishfellow.livejournal.com]

Crud. "Too slow, Chicken Marengo!"

[cnoocy]

If I may ask, what is the substance of your argument?

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

The dispute is whether it is necessary to correctly handle accented characters when adding "sort" functionality to a software package that has explicitly defined its audience as "U.S. English only" for a first release, or whether sorting by Unicode code point is sufficient.

As you might surmise, I am taking the position that there are a sufficient number of cases where a "U.S. English" user will need to properly sort data that includes accented characters that this is not an i18n/l10n issue. Unfortunately, my argument so far has examples that are not likely to win over my counterpart:

Even in English we sometimes encounter words with accents (cities such as Montréal; names such as Gödel, Möbius, and Erdøs; titles such as Götterdämmerung; loan words such as flambé; and words requiring diacritics such as naïve) and it is important that these sort correctly (e.g., Gödel comes before Greene).

If I could have demonstrated a single case that is likely to show up in a list of business-oriented data, I'd have more of a leg to stand on. If, for example, Omaha were spelled with an initial Ö, and I could easily show that it would fall after Yorba Linda, instead of between New York and Portland, and that would be bad.

[sethg]

Fortunately I have a secret scrolla PostgreSQL database into which the entire USGS gazetteer has been loaded.

 Doña Ana County      | New Mexico |     135510
 Kāne'ohe             | Hawaii     |      34970
 La Cañada Flintridge | California |      20318
 Kīhei                | Hawaii     |      16749
 Wahiawā              | Hawaii     |      16151
 Cañon City           | Colorado   |      15431
 Hālawa               | Hawaii     |      13891
 Hālawa Heights       | Hawaii     |      13408
 Nānākuli             | Hawaii     |      10814
 'Āhuimanu            | Hawaii     |       8506
 Mākaha               | Hawaii     |       7753
 Hōlualoa             | Hawaii     |       6107
 Mā'ili               | Hawaii     |       5943
 Lā'ie                | Hawaii     |       4585
 Waimānalo Beach      | Hawaii     |       4271
 Pūpūkea              | Hawaii     |       4250
 Waimānalo            | Hawaii     |       3664
 Hanamā'ulu           | Hawaii     |       3611
 Lāna'i City          | Hawaii     |       3164
 Lāna'i               | Hawaii     |       2200
 Hanapēpē             | Hawaii     |       2153
 Mokulē'ia            | Hawaii     |       1776
 Pāpa'ikou            | Hawaii     |       1414
 Doña Ana             | New Mexico |       1379
 Pāhala               | Hawaii     |       1378
 Kā'anapali           | Hawaii     |       1375
 Mākaha Valley        | Hawaii     |       1289
 Nā'ālehu             | Hawaii     |        919
 Waikāne              | Hawaii     |        726
 Hāna                 | Hawaii     |        709
 Peña Blanca          | New Mexico |        661
 Peñasco              | New Mexico |        572
 Honomū               | Hawaii     |        541
 Laupāhoehoe          | Hawaii     |        473
 Cañada de los Alamos | New Mexico |        358
 Salineño             | Texas      |        304
 Lopeño               | Texas      |        140

If I hadn't filtered out the locations with a null population, then this list would be a much longer. For example, there must be some Native tribe in the northwest that has Ł in its ałphabet:

 Chatnwaqhi'łpm Grove     | Washington |
 Chł'ach'alqw Landing     | Idaho      |
 Hnmiłn Meadow            | Idaho      |
 Mił'o'lmkhw Point        | Idaho      |
 Ne'słiqhwum              | Washington |
 Ne'słiqhwum (historical) | Washington |
 Smłłene' Flat            | Idaho      |
 Tp'u'nełpm Flat          | Idaho      |
 Łq'e'ykwe' Rapid         | Idaho      |
 Łukwle' Mountain         | Idaho      |

(As a typographic pedant, you may be happy to know that the USGS list for Hawai‘i is full of names using the U+2018 left quote. But we normalized those to regular apostrophes when we imported the USGS stuff into our own database.)

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

OK, so, first of all, that's cool.

Second, you should update that wikipedia page. :-)

Third, I'm very amused by Cañada being in that list.

Fourth, I don't know if any of those will bolster my argument, given their relatively small populations, but thanks!

[sethg]

Was "Erdøs" that a diacritic-o for "Erdős"?

(I want a keyboard mapping that makes it easy for me to type directional quotes.)

[sethg]

If I update that Wikipedia page then it will attract the attention of some busybody who will say that the page ought to be deleted because mere lists are not chashuv enough for the sacred hard drives of the Wikipedia project.

You want business-oriented data, I'll give you business-oriented data. Note the list of cities down the left. They are sorted in descending order of population, but it's easy to imagine a similar application sorting them alphabetically, and if that's done in Unicode-point order, then Pāhoa would come after Princeville. Which is Just Wrong.

(Hey, you can get a four-bedroom house in Pāhoa for $350K! I wonder if there's a shul in that neighborhood.... :-)

[cnoocy]

I would think it would be easier to at least normalize the text before sorting rather than expecting or enforcing that people will normalize their own names to ASCII. I'll think more about this.

[fauxklore]

Nothing so odd about Cañada.

Cañada is the Spanish word for a "glen" or "dale".

I'm more amused by the redundancy of names like Glendale.

[sethg]

Aren't there libraries like ICU that do all the heavy lifting for this kind of work already?

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

The issue isn't how hard it will be to implement it. Libraries exist. The issue is whether it's a requirement at all --- i.e., whether the developer should invest the very small amount of time it will take to have his code call those libraries.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Um, yeah. Maybe I'll add Antonín Dvořák to the list, too. And André Previn.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

I didn't say it was odd, I said I was amused. I never learned Spanish, so I'd never encountered it before. I don't think there's yet a flat type where the two two words in the base differ by only an accent, but by gum, there should be!

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Oooh. Rodríguez. That'll sell them.

[sethg]

Alſo conſider the benefits of being able to properly reproduce eighteenth-century typography. But now I'm juſt getting ſilly.

[abbasegal.livejournal.com]

Why do you need place names to prove your case? Wouldn't personal names be enough to support your case? There are many US English speaking users who could very well have diacriticized names. And once you have proper sorting of personal names, it would be "less than professional" to not get place names correct.

It would actually be less than professional to not get place names correct, even if you don't have personal names to account for. At least in my humble opinion...

And Montréal is definitely a potential source of business for any US-located company...

[introverte.livejournal.com]

It sounds like this is your bête noire.

[sethg]

And Œdipus and Cæsar.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Personal names were what struck me as well: in addition to various Spanish names, you've got Zoë, Chloë, André...

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

Touché.