Monday 24 November 2008

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!

1 comments:

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!

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