Necessary swash cap accents

Nick Shinn
Nick Shinn Posts: 2,208
in Technique and Theory
Some swash caps are designed for all-cap setting, but this is the exception. Usually, swash capitals are designed to be the initial letter of mixed-case words.

Therefore, as many accented characters do not occur as the first letter of a word, a corresponding accented swash cap is not required. 

May these be omitted, and if so, which are they?

Comments

  • Craig Eliason
    Craig Eliason Posts: 1,436
    This is a good question. I've wondered the same before, but wound up judging it a more efficient use of my time to include everything rather than to try to research the characters that could be discarded. But perhaps some of the online resources dedicated to diacritics could (already do?) provide information on whether the characters can appear in the initial (or final for that matter) position. 
    Pretty confident you can throw out /Germandbls.init anyway! 
  • Yves Michel
    Yves Michel Posts: 181
    At least in French, the diacritics (called accents) are mandatory on the capitals. Be it at the beginning ot a word or not. It is a common mistake not to include them.
    1. It has full orthographic value;
    2. it determines pronunciation;
    3. it avoids confusion between different words like LÉGITIME and LÉGITIMÉ, MODÈLE and MODELÉ.
    The fact that it's not evident to type the accented capitals on the Azerty French keyboard partly explains this common mistake.
  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,734
    edited October 2022
    (By the way, I know this if off-topic, but it's such a shame that Typophile.com is still offline after all these years. I would have loved to share a link to the thread where I originally asked this question (I'm too lazy right now to try to find it on the Wayback Machine). There is a ton of similar useful information locked away there. I heard on Twitter that it is being restored, and I hope it happens.)
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,190
    Pretty confident you can throw out /Germandbls.init anyway! 
    For standard German, yes. I have heard that there is a dialect in which a sharp s can occur at the beginning of a word, but have not seen actual examples of it in print.

  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,208
    Thanks Mark!
    I had hoped for something less expansive, but there is some economy to be had here—notably the ogonek characters may be omitted.
  • Grzegorz Luk (gluk)
    Grzegorz Luk (gluk) Posts: 161
    edited October 2022
    Nick Shinn said:
    Thanks Mark!
    I had hoped for something less expansive, but there is some economy to be had here—notably the ogonek characters may be omitted.
    I thought so too, and then a well-known Polish comedian created a fictional character Ędward Ącki  — I mean, in fact, it is better to base it on frequency of occurrence, assuming that anything is possible (if not now, then in the future) :/

  • K Pease
    K Pease Posts: 182
    Contrariwise, it is reasonable to consider the circumstances in which swash capitals are used, and suppose that if someone is designing something with a swash capital, they will be fine with placing an accent mark for themselves when they need to. It isn't the same as preparing for the danger of a letter going missing from a paragraph of text.
  • Craig Eliason
    Craig Eliason Posts: 1,436
    edited October 2022
    Mark Simonson said:
    I believe I asked about it on Typophile and got a very helpful list of words from @James Puckett (I think it was James—if it was someone else, apologies for my poor memory).
    Searching the onelook.com dictionary with wildcards is one way to put something like this together--I thought of it here because I'm pretty sure I first learned about it through James!
  • James Puckett
    James Puckett Posts: 1,993
    Craig Eliason said:
    Mark Simonson said:
    I believe I asked about it on Typophile and got a very helpful list of words from @James Puckett (I think it was James—if it was someone else, apologies for my poor memory).
    Searching the onelook.com dictionary with wildcards is one way to put something like this together--I thought of it here because I'm pretty sure I first learned about it through James!
    That’s how I found many of the words. I also used grep to get words from password dictionaries. A few I found by feeding a letter to Google and sometimes something useful came up. And I probably used Antconc to extract some words from corpora. 

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