That’s a stun­ning poster. I want one.

I see Gill Sans, but I can’t tell you what all those funny marks are for the life of me, except for the tilde over the “n.”

and my favor­ite, the umlaut over the second ‘a’ in char­ac­ter

Well, let me try:
cir­cum­flex above the i and the e; acute above the E and the r; dot­ac­cent above the g; caron above the s and the c; ring above the a; tilde above the a and the n; the d with the bar is usu­ally referred to as dcroat, but i don’t know if this bar has a spe­cial name…; slash cross­ing the o; macron above the e; comma accent under the t and cedilla under the c and the s; dier­esis above the a; grave above the e. Plus we have the german double s, that obvi­ously is not a dia­critic, but isn’t as well used in eng­lish.
Everything ok?

If we’re talk­ing Irish lan­guage (or gaelic) then the mark over the E would be a fada or a síneadh fada.

And are there pos­sibly marks from the Pinyin lan­guage? because those would be Mid-​tones (3rd tones), per­haps over the s and the c. And a normal or flat tone (1st tone) over the e.

Well that “a” is a dead give-​away for gill sans, and I see some tildes, cir­cum­flices, a ring, an essz­ett, a slashed “O”, cedil­las, an eth, an under­com­maed “t”, a macron above the “e”. I don’t know what the dot above the “g” is called, unless it’s called a dot.

I think it needs an European to help you out

From the french: The î in wish is called accent cir­cum­flex (also present on the ê in inter­est­ing), the é on eng­lish accent aigu, on char­ac­ters there is the ç called c sedille and the è called accent grave.

German offers here the ß es-​zet in inter­est­ing and the ä a-Umlaut in char­ac­ters.

From the Scand­inavian lan­guages are starred the å which I don’t know the name but which has a sim­ilar func­tion as the german Umlaut in lan­guage and so does the ø in more.

Speak­ing of more, I would say the sign on the e is a sign from the japan­ese tran­scrip­tion lan­guage which has the func­tion to double the length of the tone, but I could be wrong.

The d in had looks very island­ish to me… and turk­ish the s in char­ac­ters.

From slavic lan­guages I think there are signs like the s in Eng­lish and the second c in char­ac­ters.

Cheers

Oh, I only know the ñ from span­ish, the ã and ç from por­tuguese and the î from french.

And I wonder how these words would sound if pron­nun­ci­ated accord­ing to all that dia­crit­ics.

Typeface: Gill Sans, by Eric Gill.

Dia­crit­ical marks and language-​specific char­ac­ters in order of appear­ance: cir­cum­flex (ˆ), acute accent (´), caron/hácek/wedge (ˇ), kroužek/ring (˚), tidle (˜), dyet*, slashed o (ø), macron (¯), eszett lig­at­ure (ß), under­comma (¸), cedilla (ç), umlaut/diaeresis (¨), grave accent (`).

* Couldn’t figure out a way to gen­er­ate a dyet—sorry.

Sad to see the breve (˘) miss­ing. ;)

Gill Sans I agree. The dot adove the g is an over­dot.
The d with the bar – dcroat – is that used in Eng­lish?

@Neels de Coning: knew I missed some­thing!

Lovely poster indeed. But care­ful what you wish for! Having dia­crit­ics means a few annoy­ances when design­ing, like making sure you have enough lead­ing (or try set­ting some­thing in all caps with mul­tiple rows and neg­at­ive lead­ing… not pretty). Some typefaces have the dia­crit­ics of ă, î, â (I’m Romanian) set higher than ascend­ers which causes more head­aches. Oh, and you can forget about dis­cre­tion­ary lig­at­ures in most cases as they become too dis­tract­ing to read along­side all the “squig­gly things” (as an Amer­ican friend puts it).

Awe­some work. loving the sim­pli­city.

Well in Den­mark we have the Æ Ø and Å - they are very dif­fi­cult to pro­nounce for for­eign­ers and stupid when having things shipped from abroad. How­ever, the can also be writ­ten in the old fash­ioned way making it easier when using inter­na­tion­ally: æ = ae, ø = oe, å = aa.

Fur­ther­more, there is dicus­sion about remov­ing them from the Danish alpha­bet as we are focus­ing so must on the world around us. We have Eng­lish in 2nd grade and 3rd lan­guage in 4th (French or German, but will prop­erly soon also have the option of Span­ish).

I really like the poster as well!

Sílvio is right. Assum­ing you wanted the Eng­lish names.

Dcroat is a short glyph name for Croa­tian D/d (I think it reads as “dj” in Eng­lish). The dia­crit­ical mark is a bar, though. The dot above -g- is usu­ally called a “dot accent”. Over­dot is also cor­rect I guess.

I only wish these Gill Sans accents were designed with more care:
- ring, slash, and macron are too light (even though some people might like it this way, esp. slash and ring)
- accents above -a- are oddly posi­tioned (too much to the right)
- acute, grave, cir­cum­flex, and caron does not seem well related to the typeface design

And to finish my cri­ti­cism :) pinyin is a roman­ized system of trans­lit­er­at­ing Chinese. It is not a lan­guage. How­ever, dia­crit­ics are often used in dif­fer­ent national alphabets/transliterations and do not neces­sar­ily rep­res­ent always the same sound.

Lovely poster! Very good that people real­ize that there are more than 26 let­ters of the Latin alpha­bet.

And “møre” in Danish is “tender”! ;-)

The poster is mighty cool. It reminds me of IñţërñățîôɲǎłíΖαtìøηş, the text I use to test Uni­code sup­port in a font or CMS.

[RO] Bună @Dan, şi eu sunt român. [/RO] The accep­ted typo­graphic con­ven­tion is to not use accents on abbre­vi­ations. I can’t say for sure about upper­case words in-​line, the first cap­ital in a name or sen­tence, I know I simply don’t use them.

i wish these Gill dia­crit­ics were more har­mo­ni­ous!
(one example: gdot­ac­cent vs. i, why is the dot on g square???)

Hi! Very nice poster, love it, really!
Just a quick tip: in Romanian (the other two guys didn’t men­tion it) the ș ț ă â are con­sidered to be actual let­ters and they are dis­tinct phon­emes. Which makes them pretty import­ant.. i remem­ber in first grade, every­one was saying the alpha­bet with those 4 included.

This brings to my mind title of Twardoch’s slides [i]That annoy­ing noise around let­ters. Latin dia­critic char­ac­ter design[/i], you can see it here: [url]http://www.twardoch.com/adam/project.php?pid=0062[/url]

You have to love the names of these things, they sound fant­astic. I wish I had more occa­sion to use these, the closest I get is set­ting for­mu­lae — there are some nice phys­ics con­stants that use dia­crit­ics.

i think the carons and cir­cum­lfexes are too small and most of the accents are oddly posi­tioned… so i wish the eng­lish lan­guage had more inter­est­ing char­ac­ters as well, so every­one knows how they should look like :) the poster is nice any­ways! cheers

@ Johno,
It seems you have acquired a Romanian fol­low­ing!

@ Gab­riel Radic
[Salut!] Let me explain myself: let’s say you’d want to set a short para­graph in all caps (or small caps, for that matter) and you’d reduce the lead­ing to the point that the rows would be almost sit­ting on top of each other. You couldn’t do that because of the dia­crit­ics.

@ Gab­riel Radic “The accep­ted typo­graphic con­ven­tion is to not use accents on abbre­vi­ations.” This is inter­est­ing! This is def­in­itely not gen­eral rule for all lan­guages, but is it really the way you would do it in Romanian? For both acronyms and abbre­vi­ations? Why is that?

yes I wish it too… cause I cannot find some REAL foudry char­ac­ter with italian dia­crit­ic­als!

see ya
,
matt

@Dan: You’re right, I was only refer­ring to the more common uses of caps. For all caps para­graphs, maybe it makes sense to provide spa­cing dir­ectly in you style, since this would some­thing like a chapeau, not an isol­ated occurence. Or maybe it is, and then you’re screwed :-)

@David Březina: This is the case for French and _I think_ also for Romanian. I did DTP full-​time for some pretty import­ant Romanian pub­lic­a­tions, yet can’t remem­ber this for sure.

ok, let’s go. it’s gill sans, of course.
now the lovely dia­crit­ics, in order of appear­ance:

cir­cum­flex
acute
over­dot
caron
ring
tilde
dyet
slashed o
macron
tilde
acute
cir­cum­flex
eszett
under­comma
cedilla
diaer­esis (or umlaut)
caron
grave
cedilla
.

You have the Swedish char­ac­ter å. Or rather a char­ac­ter sim­ilar to this char­ac­ter, your is too fugly to be of Swedish origin. And some­thing that resembles the Swedish char­ac­ter ä.

Common Swedish char­ac­ters:
- Å -
Developed from an A with an O on top.
- Ä -
Developed from an A with an E on top.
- Ö -
Developed from an O with an E on top.
- Ñ -
Mostly span­ish loan words. Char­ac­ters “nj” is pro­noun­sed sim­ilar in Swedish and is some­times used instead.
- É -
Mostly french loan words.
- Ü -
Mostly German loan words and names. The char­ac­ter “y” is pro­noun­sed sim­ilar in Swedish and can be used instead. When there is no Swedish word with the same spelling, “u” can be used.

Rare Swedish char­ac­ters:
- Z -
Words of Greek origin.
- W -
Now only used in names. Used in old Swedish spelling, as in old spelling of “Swedish”: “swänsk”, now: “svensk”.

Ä and Ö is sim­ilar in use to Æ and Ø in some other Scand­inavian lan­guages. Å, Ä and Ö also looks sim­ilar to char­ac­ters with dia­cret­ics, used in other, non-​nordic, lan­guages, but they are used com­pletely dif­fer­ent (and don’t look the same, ÅÄÖ are char­ac­ters, not char­ac­ters with dia­cret­ics).

Names of per­sons from coun­tries with latin char­ac­ters is spelled with the same dia­cret­ics as they would in their own lan­guage. Other names (like cities or coun­tries) are usu­ally Swedi­fied.

Some­times, when it’s unclear how a loan word would be pro­nunced oth­er­wise, we use dia­crit­ics from other European coun­tries with Latin char­ac­ters, and Rus­sian or Icelandic char­ac­ters.

Typo­graph­ic­ally Swedish is a lot dif­fer­ent from Eng­lish and other lan­guages. We have never had any type foundries, to speak of, of our own. In the lead type days we man­aged by modi­fy­ing matrices and other equip­ment from other coun­tries (mostly German, French and Brit­tish), and by skill­ful type set­ters that adjus­ted the spa­cing of the types. Today we use fonts and typo­graphic pro­grams made for the Eng­lish lan­guage (or Uni­code, which is the same thing) and it looks awful.

This guy don’t know what he means, I speak span­ish and we only have this kind of char­ac­teres á, é, í, ó, ú and this ü only, and is so com­plic­ated some­times, I can’t pic­ture how difi­cult most to be to people in russia to write. Eng­lish is OK.

Wow, this has been fas­cin­at­ing. Too bad Eng­lish doesn’t use inter­est­ing marks, but I see how it messes up lead­ing and throws a wrench into other things (and makes it type­set­ting more com­plic­ated and tedi­ous than it already is.)

Great post! Thanks for shar­ing it. I now know more about dia­crit­ics!

@Pat: Rus­si­ans, like Greeks, have a dif­fer­ent alpha­bet. I don’t know if they even have accents or dia­crit­ical let­ters. Viet­namese, OTOH http://​en.​wiki​pe​dia.​org/​w​i​k​i​/​V​i​e​t​n​a​m​e​s​e​_​a​l​p​h​a​b​e​t​#​L​e​t​t​e​r​_​n​a​m​e​s​_​a​n​d​_​p​r​o​n​u​n​c​i​ation

Too bad the poster didn’t use any Viet­namese — they put mul­tiple accents on a letter, some­times up to three, until the let­ters look like por­cu­pines or Swiss Army knives. (Must have been some French­man who came up with the Lat­in­iz­a­tion of their lan­guage; what was he smoking?)

The poster also reminds me of some inter­na­tion­al­iz­a­tion (abbrev. “I18N”) tools for com­puter soft­ware that gen­er­ate fake trans­la­tions by just taking the Eng­lish and adding accents to all the let­ters. This is a good way for mono­lin­gual developers to find parts of their code that break on non-​ASCII text, or places where the pro­gram has hard­coded Eng­lish text instead of look­ing up the trans­la­tion.

Don’t forget the tittle. :) With a name like that it has to be inter­est­ing.

I did a menu for a Viet­manese res­taur­ant last year with all the menu items in Viet­namese. Fig­ur­ing out the dif­fer­ent dia­crit­ic­als was a night­mare (a ‘u’ with a horn? Ser­i­ously? Actu­ally: ư ), but worse was trying to find the HTML entity codes for all the dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters. BTW, file​format.info saved me on this pro­ject.

I agree with Jens: the person who inflic­ted this on the Viet­namese was smoking good South­east Asian opium.

Way to go Mikey!!

Must get this blown up on stretched canvas, http://​www.​Can​vas​Press.com and put it beside my desk. A reminder how much there is to love about typo­graphy

Don’t try to enter the United States with that poster. It’s a clear viol­a­tion of Home­land Secur­ity.

cool poster

the a with the circle over it and the o with the line through it are extra let­ters in them­selves….

I love the poster, just with I could get the doc­u­ment to print it myself :P

Maybe he should start selling it…

Speak­ing of Romanian dia­critic ped­antries, please remem­ber not to use incor­rect (Microsoft-​style) Turk­ish ‘ş’ and ‘ţ’ (s and t with cedilla) — Gab­riel, I’m look­ing at you :) — over cor­rect Romanian ‘ș’ and ‘ț’ (s and t with comma below).

simply true!

Eng­lish is a mess. Is uses and abuses from the entire world of lan­guages.

That is what makes it one of the greatest lan­guages on Earth.

Very good title on this post. I always try to come up with good puns (not an oxy­moron) for the post head­ings on my local polit­ical blog, and it ain’t always easy.

@Kit: Been there, done that, only to have my read­ers com­plain about the recțangleș in the text. Sad, but sup­port for the proper Romanian let­ters isn’t quite wide­spread yet. And the iPhone fonts are a step back for “Mac OS” in this regard.

Gill Sans or Human­ist.

Oh, no, Thank God Eng­lish does not have dia­crit­ics!!!

I’m a native French speaker (and thus, writer) and let me tell you that we’re let­ting you off easy not having to deal with dia­crit­ics. Eng­lish is by far one of the easi­est lan­guages I’ve ever learned, and def­in­itely the easi­est latin-​based.

I was so excited to see what some of you called the dcroat - the ‘d’ with a bar (as in ‘had’), because I have that very sign in my name and I use it very rarely (my e-mail for instance).

Someone said cor­rectly - it is pro­nounced ‘dj’ in Eng­lish, but note the dif­fer­ence between đ and dž, the latter is like ‘j’ in ‘joy’ or ‘g’ in ‘gym’, while the former is a some­what “softer” ver­sion of it.

Yeah, I know, Croa­tian seems com­plic­ated :)

yes, i would like it too :), than I could use more fonts and not be lim­ited on those few with croa­tian cara­c­ters (č, ć, š, đ, ž)

“And the iPhone fonts are a step back for “Mac OS” in this regard.”

Why, because they don’t rep­lic­ate some Win­dows 95 mis­takes that tend to cor­rupt the cor­rect stand­ards? Oh please! The iPhone glyphs are dead on cor­rect — and that’s some­thing that should be admired and embraced, not repu­di­ated.

Better drop dia­crit­ics alto­gether than use some sloppy sub­sti­tu­tions (ã or ǎ instead of ă, ş instead of ș, ţ instead of ţ).

@Kit: No, I’ve meant that the cor­rect diacrițicș “were” not prop­erly rendered by the iPhone, so I had to revert to ţhe cedilla verşion. Seems to be greatly improved now, prob­ably since the 2.0 update. Thanks for the heads-​up.

In latvian we use these:
ē ū ī ļ ķ ģ š ā ž č ņ
macron is used to lenghten dur­a­tion of vowels
caron and cedilla are used to “soften” con­son­ants

My family name “Ødegården” (Nor­we­gian) was once under­stood (by a public office in the UK) to be “Degarden”. (The woman behind the counter thought I’d made a mis­take start­ing with an O, then thought better of it, and made a slash across it to annul it. Hence I had become Mr. Degarden, which is nice (too), how­ever incor­rect.)

Ø, ø and Å, å are (as already poin­ted out by others above) char­ac­ters in Scand­inavian alpha­bets – they are not dia­crit­ics as such. The Nor­we­gian alpha­bet con­tains 29 char­ac­ters (the same 26 as in Eng­lish + æ, ø and å).

That poster is my anthem!

Why there is not a single ogonek there??? Duh. There are mil­lions of Poles in the UK now, they could make at least one ę or ą.

Eh. ;-)

Damn, e with ogonek is the most eleg­ant dia­crit­ical com­bin­a­tion! There’s noth­ing arti­fi­cial in it’s graph­eme, just con­tinu­ous cal­li­graphic move­ment, so coher­ent, so simple. In fact, when this ogonek is prop­erly executed it don’t even look like dia­critic.

good work, Con­grat­u­la­tions.

ç and ş from Turkish’s alpha­bet.