I wish the English.....
I love this poster, shared with me on Twitter by @nwinton from the imaginatively named I love Typography blog in a post entitled Diacritical Challenge. The challenge is to a) name the font and b) identify the diacritical marks!
I've got to say that I couldn't name all of them but there are plenty of people having a go in the comments!!
The subtitle of the post is 'Squiggly bits' which is how many of the pupils I teach describe them. As they're unfamiliar in our language, it can take a bit of explaining but ñ isn't too hard to explain, and the accents in Spanish to show where to stress words is easily explained when I mispronounce their names by stressing the wrong bit. And ¡ and ¿ are explained by the need to know if something is a question or exclamation a the beginning of the sentence so that your intonation is correct - cue much overacting ;o)
All counts towards Knowledge about Language!
Cool find! It perfectly captures the paradox of the lingua franca that is English. Whoever designed that poster should market it to ESL teachers and English language academies in non-English speaking countries. He/she would rake in the dough!
Cody's Cuentos said... 1 December 2008 at 16:25
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