TIL that the Māori word for autism is "Takiwātanga" meaning "their own time and space." I also learned that it's not without controversy (see inside).
I thought the word and the definition sounded beautiful, but then I also learned that it was coined in 2017 and has been accused of imposing outside culture. Namely, here is a criticism I found on Twitter and Reddit but without further attribution or detail:
Just wanted to share and see what the community thought about it.
I find it hard to blame people for bad use of characters that they don't have on their keyboard layouts. I'm French speaking, I don't care if you're not putting an accent on "échelle" when writing to me in a casual conversation, I understand you mean "ladder" when you write "echelle".
Edit: Makes me think, I myself am often just working on something with the US layout at the same time as communicating in French, and not wanting to juggle between layouts, I just skip accents.
In Scandinavian languages, åäöæø are not even accents. They're completely separate letters. And substitutions can lead to entirely different words. It still used to be common to see ao used instead when a lot of systems had problems with anything other than 7bit ASCII. (Mostly Microsoft, of course.)
On the other hand there were things like TV shows where names might be transliterated, so Pääkkönen might become paeaekkoenen which is text gore, but might have some chance of getting pronounced remotely right.
Oh and the generally "funny" feature especially in dumb phones where the so called Microsoft alphabetical order would put ä first in a list instead of nearly last.
Thank you, I appreciate this as someone who speaks two languages of which neither has accents.
Edit: I'm sorry, you guys, I just realized my fucking native tongue has some rarely used accents. I am not a smart woman. And I agree that if someone omitted them, I would still understand what they meant.
Actually relevant. As long as you know the accents exist at all in those words. For me it's hard to remember them, especially in foreign languages I don't speak, I kind of remember the "phonetic" version in my language, if it makes sense. Sometimes we have common accents that do different things to letters or words. Other times it's just like nothing I've ever seen, so I have no idea how it's pronounced or what it is.
Fun fact, the "Académie française" (French language authority) dropped a bunch of accents with their "nouvelle grammaire". A notable example are words with a circumflex accent on the O, like "hôpital" or "hôpital". The accent was present to replace the "os" in the old spellings (hospital/hostel, the S was carried over from Latin), didn't change the pronunciation in any way.
I'm German myself but since I am a programmer I like the US-Keyboard more than the German one. The easy fix for me was using US-intl-nodeadkeys so I can use the right alt key to type those stupid German umlauts. This should work at least for most (Western-)European languages.
I got tired of switching keyboards so I learned the slt codes for common accents. Saves time and there are only really a handful of common ones that you need for the average message