Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

Traffic's been a little slow here of late, so I thought I'd share this interesting development in sports. Not really a question, but check out this piece by linguist Arika Okrent. In Peña's case, the difference was the meaning "rock" for Peña and "pity" or "pain" for Pena. And this change of meaning doesn't just happen for the Spanish language.

NFL player Michael Hoomanawanui is having trouble getting the Pro Shop to fit his entire name on a jersey. With the minimum character spacing required for readability they'll have to switch to a smaller font. Not sure why that's an issue, since I'm pretty sure the printing process is done by computers, but I don't know for sure. If so, that would seem to make the accent marks a non-issue.

Like I said ... not really any questions. Just an interesting item on orthography.