“Diacritics and glyphs: What language is this?” you could be asking… As weird as it may seem, we are talking good old English.
Therefore, before proceeding with our series on internationalization, I think it’s better to explain two concepts that will be used often moving forward: glyphs and diacritics.
- Glyphs
The term glyph is used to describe the physical appearance of a character. Computer fonts, for example, form a set of glyphs. Following are some:
Glyphs representing lower case letters ‘a’ with Zapfino font.
Block of Mayan glyphs.
Egyptian glyphs (also known as hieroglyphics).
2. Diacritics
According to Wikipedia, a diacritic is an ancillary glyph added to a letter, or a basic glyph used, for example, to change the sound of a letter to which it was added. Among the various diacritics in the Portuguese language, there are the acute and grave accents, the cedilla, the tilde, the umlaut…hold on! They don’t have that one anymore!
Now that you have been introduced to my old friends, Glyph and Diacritic, you will see how it will be much easier now to understand the next few posts. Until then!
