Sean (sp): where does the accent go?

Subject: Sean (sp): where does the accent go?
From: michaelr
Date: 22 May 07 - 06:54 PM

For correct Irish spelling of the name Sean, does the accent belong over the e or the a?

Cheers,
Michael

Subject: RE: Sean (sp): where does the accent go?
From: Geoff the Duck
Date: 22 May 07 - 07:43 PM

And I thought you were wanting to know why the "Irish" band in the pub don't sound Irish after the gig!
Quack!
GtD.

Subject: RE: Sean (sp): where does the accent go?
From: Peace
Date: 22 May 07 - 07:49 PM

It goes over the a: Seán.

Subject: RE: Sean (sp): where does the accent go?
From: GUEST
Date: 22 May 07 - 07:56 PM

ok!

sean - old, aged, mature, long established, (of calender old style)

séan - mark with sign, bless
       declare untrue, to deny

seán - used in phrases Seán na gealai (jack-o-lantern) Seán Buí (John Bull) as Jack or John

does that help?

Subject: RE: Sean (sp): where does the accent go?
From: Peace
Date: 22 May 07 - 08:01 PM

WOW.

Subject: RE: Sean (sp): where does the accent go?
From: Declan
Date: 22 May 07 - 08:08 PM

Guest has it right. The Síne fada (long sign, or accent) is on the a. Leaving it out changes the meaning ot he word as well as the pronunciation.

Séan would be pronounced Shane rather than Shawn. No accent would be pronounced Shan.

Subject: RE: Sean (sp): where does the accent go?
From: GUEST,Canadienne
Date: 22 May 07 - 08:10 PM

sorry - "guest" was me and my thanks to Dinneen :)

Subject: RE: Sean (sp): where does the accent go?
From: michaelr
Date: 22 May 07 - 08:31 PM

Thanks very much! I knew I could count on Mudcat.

Slan,
Micheal

Subject: RE: Sean (sp): where does the accent go?
From: Big Mick
Date: 22 May 07 - 08:52 PM

Nicely done, GUEST.

Mick

Subject: RE: Sean (sp): where does the accent go?
From: michaelr
Date: 23 May 07 - 07:07 PM

One more question: How to do accents (fadas) in HTML?

TIA,
Michael

Subject: RE: Sean (sp): where does the accent go?
From: Jack Campin
Date: 23 May 07 - 07:23 PM

Unless you absolutely have to, don't. It makes your text less indexable by search engines and less likely to render correctly on all browsers - what if your reader has their machine set up for an unusual combination of fonts, like what most Czech machines use? Nobody is going to misunderstand you in a context where a name is obviously meant.

If you really, truly do have to, type Seán to get Seán. Look up a quick guide to HTML to get others. But whatever you do DON'T just type an accented character on your keyboard and expect it to work. On any machine of a different type than yours, it won't. (The Footstompin forum looks extraordinarily silly on anything but a Windows machine because it's full of Gaelic names and their dimwit software doesn't convert the Windows character set into standard HTML - don't be like that).

Subject: RE: Sean (sp): where does the accent go?
From: Declan
Date: 23 May 07 - 07:57 PM

If you want to spell your name incorrectly Jack, That's fine by me. My Official first name is Seán (not Sean). Sorry if this messes up your computer, but that's my name.

Subject: RE: Sean (sp): where does the accent go?
From: Bob Bolton
Date: 23 May 07 - 09:38 PM

G'day,

What is the comparison - in terms of likelihood of "correct reading" on someone else's computer screen - between the various HTML composite entries and just typing the 'Alt Key plus 0 plus 3-number code' to use the accented letter from the second half of the standard ASCII font set. For most standard fonts you can get a reliable acute accented 'a' by typing [Alt Key] 0225 ... for á.

My Mulga Wire (Aussie 'Bush Music' magazine) that went to the printers yesterday happily refers to "... fiddler Seán Doherty ... from Western Australia ..." and typing in a known Alt Key code is not much slower then capitalising or italicising words or letters, where necessary.

Regards,

Bob

Subject: RE: Sean (sp): where does the accent go?
From: Q (Frank Staplin)
Date: 23 May 07 - 11:04 PM

The key I have uses &#, followed by the number 225, then semicolon.

Seán

Often spelled Shaun on the west side of the pond.

Subject: RE: Sean (sp): where does the accent go?
From: Jack Campin
Date: 24 May 07 - 03:01 AM

The ALT key stunt is exactly what you don't want to do. It happened to produce a result that my browser displayed the same as yours, but it isn't standard HTML and you have no guarantee that all browsers will reproduce it correctly.

There is no such thing as "the second half of the standard ASCII font set". ASCII has only 127 7-bit characters, the others are NOT standard. Which is why HTML uses ASCII codes like á to represent them.

In some contexts you can use 8-bit or 16-bit characters the way you want, but there needs to be a declaration somewhere at the start of the page saying what the encoding is - otherwise the reader's browser has no way to tell if a particular high-bit character is to be read as Irish or Chinese. There is no way to put such a declaration into a message to a web forum, and this forum has not been set up to do it for you.

Some word processors or text editors have utilities to convert 8-bit chacters into HTML ASCII codes.

Subject: RE: Sean (sp): where does the accent go?
From: Bob Bolton
Date: 25 May 07 - 12:42 AM

G'day Jack Campin,

I think we may be living in different environments ... if not to say time schemes.

What I post (or publish in other formats / fora / forms is intended to be read on computers - not HTML pages. The 'Extended HTML' set is firmly part of all modern fonts ... and consistent in its content within "language groups" (and mine is English language). If I accent a letter I expect the application to find the letter ... without recourse to opening in an HTML environment.

Re: "There is no such thing as "the second half of the standard ASCII font set". ASCII has only 127 7-bit characters, the others are NOT standard. " please note what I passed on a site dealing with Cyrillic font sets:

In computers, letters, numbers and other symbols are assigned values in the so-called ASCII system (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). The normal allocations are (in part): the English letters, punctuation marks and numerals are assigned to positions 32 through 127. Many other symbols and accented (French, Spanish, German, etc.) letters are placed in the range from 128 to 255. This is termed the "extended" ASCII.

...
In the early days of computers, the ASCII code only went to 127...

...

In the ASCII system, the numerical value of any character is limited to two bytes, i.e., any value from 0 to 255...

...

Certainly special language sets will have other characters in their "second half" ... I have loaded on my work machine a bundle of Vietnamese fonts which I needed for bilingual presentations by our International Division. Although they seem to retain most of the standard "European" accents in place ... they assigne everything else on the second set to a plethora of Vietnamese vowels with 2 ... or even 3 ... different Vietnamese accents simultaneously applied!

Out of its field, Web code becomes a minefield.

Regards,

Bob