Norm d'Plume wrote:Actually, the use of macrons to denote long vowels dates back to the time of Ancient Rome,
No, that is incorrect, unless, as today, there was some instructional need. Written Latin was no more spelled out in phonemes and accents than is English. I never learned Latin that way because as a dead language it is actually pointless.
Norm d'Plume wrote:often used by the Greeks (not the Romans), who had trouble distinguishing long and short Latin vowels. They're found on papyri from that period. Most modern Latin textbooks and dictionaries use them, although primarily for pronounciation. Wikipedia does as well whenever giving Latin translations (e.g., the names/titles of Roman emperors). I prefer them as they add a bit of flair to the Latin words in my text.
. . . like I said. For you do to that in fiction, in anything other than for something instructional, would be more than annoying.
Norm d'Plume wrote:I'm curious to know why IE/Wordperfect work and Google/Office don't. I would have expected the reverse.
It is obviously possible to cut-and-paste macrons into forums, but not into the posting editor which still has font bugs, as far as I am concerned.
On the other hand, for an English-language publication, that second tier of ASCII symbol characters (Latin-1, 00F, ü) is all that is allowed, and certainly nothing like Turkish or Russian cyrillic. but for French, Spanish, German, etc. which are sometimes used in English-language text. The answer to your question IE v. Google might be how much resource the designer wants to devote to holding special characters.
