There was NEVER an excuse for this. In the hot lead era, basic fonts didn't include diacritics, but the diacritics were available to newspapers and book publishers who needed them. For instance, an 1895 catalog from Inland Type Foundry in St Louis included German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Bohemian, and the standard phonetic symbols used in dictionaries at the time. Inland mostly supplied country papers in the midwest. Those particular languages were needed because immigrant communities had their own newspapers in their own languages.
There was NEVER an excuse for this. In the hot lead era, basic fonts didn't include diacritics, but the diacritics were available to newspapers and book publishers who needed them. For instance, an 1895 catalog from Inland Type Foundry in St Louis included German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Bohemian, and the standard phonetic symbols used in dictionaries at the time. Inland mostly supplied country papers in the midwest. Those particular languages were needed because immigrant communities had their own newspapers in their own languages.
For reference, the 'auxiliary accents' are on p 340 of this PDF.
As a speaker of a diacritics-heavy language -- Lithuanian, though it's not as complicated as Vietnamese, I've noticed a peculiar trend. People working for international companies tend to drop their diacritics in email signatures, professional profiles, and even CVs. So a Šarūnas becomes a Sarunas, Živilė becomes Zivile and so on. I've heard people do so mainly so "foreigners don't get confused" but I suspect there's also the desire to signal as more international/affluent/Western.
There was NEVER an excuse for this. In the hot lead era, basic fonts didn't include diacritics, but the diacritics were available to newspapers and book publishers who needed them. For instance, an 1895 catalog from Inland Type Foundry in St Louis included German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Bohemian, and the standard phonetic symbols used in dictionaries at the time. Inland mostly supplied country papers in the midwest. Those particular languages were needed because immigrant communities had their own newspapers in their own languages.
There was NEVER an excuse for this. In the hot lead era, basic fonts didn't include diacritics, but the diacritics were available to newspapers and book publishers who needed them. For instance, an 1895 catalog from Inland Type Foundry in St Louis included German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Bohemian, and the standard phonetic symbols used in dictionaries at the time. Inland mostly supplied country papers in the midwest. Those particular languages were needed because immigrant communities had their own newspapers in their own languages.
For reference, the 'auxiliary accents' are on p 340 of this PDF.
https://books.google.com/books?id=K5ngAAAAMAAJ
Thank you for this insight!!!
As a speaker of a diacritics-heavy language -- Lithuanian, though it's not as complicated as Vietnamese, I've noticed a peculiar trend. People working for international companies tend to drop their diacritics in email signatures, professional profiles, and even CVs. So a Šarūnas becomes a Sarunas, Živilė becomes Zivile and so on. I've heard people do so mainly so "foreigners don't get confused" but I suspect there's also the desire to signal as more international/affluent/Western.
Really interesting, Oleg!!