Caracas Chronicles

Most english speaking people have no idea what the tilde in Ñ means. Putting the ñ would be the same as simply changing his name and writing it piniaera, which just needlessly confuses them. Better keep it simple and if anyone examines things a little closer they can find out for themselves.

Merida

Quico,

I get it. I really do. In fact, I am more diligent about Spanish punctuation than most Venezuelans I know.

However... english keyboards don't even have a "ñ"! To do what you are asking, would require them to load the Spanish alphabet into the computer and then switch over to it when needed. And if you think they butcher Spanish, you should consider what they do to Swedish and Russian! We won't even talk about Greek.

Aguantalo amigo. :)

I would be happy with any kind of quality control or even proofreading.

Should we start talking about the accuracy of the names Ahmadinejad, Putin, Gorbachev, Kim Jong-il, etc? Does it bother you when they don't put the accent in Chávez? And do you write Curaçao or Curacao? São Paulo or Sao Paulo?

Otaku!

provided you just switch on the right keyboard or simply do some copy-paste, it is easy to switch from Azerty to Qwerty, from English to Arabic to Russian in a second but then:
should Dvorak not be Dvořák? And should Erdogan not be Erdoğan?
I think we are asking too much.
Let them write Piñera as they want.

I'd rather see that Spanish speakers use tildes and punctuation marks in the right places when writing in their own language, something I very seldom see.

To Anon:

Thanks! I wasn't aware of the Alt164 trick.

However, my comment still stands. Until I learned to speak Spanish, I didn't even know how a "

Uh oh... I just tried "Alt 1 6 4". It didn't do anything.

Kepler is right. If English language reporters had to add the foreign language accents to every foreign name in every foreign language, they would spend an excessive amount of time doing so. And their readers still wouldn't know how to pronounce them!

For quite a while I've been using and proposing the use of N instead of ñ. As in PiNera. That goes for accents and diEresis (e.g., esdrUjula, cumanA, ridIculo, vergUenza, lingUIstica). Vice-versa when writing in caps (e.g., PInERA, ESDRuJULA, CUMANa, RIDiCULO, DIeRESIS, VERGuENZA, LINGuiSTICA).

(Roy, you must use the 1 6 4 on the numeric keypad.)

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PiÑera's name is actually Sebastián, not Santiago ;)

 That his name is Sebastián, not Santiago? 
It's funny you would make this mistake while playing grammar cop with the BBC...

The New York Times uses the ñ, even US immigration agencies are using it now, unlike the BBC. Here, I am willing to venture that an old school phobia for things Spanish is at play. Probably leftovers from the time of Catalina de Aragón.

In my case have a US QUERTY keyboard, also a Mac. I can even write in Nepalese if need be. Even while doing shell, I can use extented alphabets, I think the BBC is just holding to one of its foibles: if it is not in there it does not exist.

I was not going to say anything about capitalizing, but really! do I want my texts looking like deranged ramson notes?...

The BBC is often incoherent about foreign words.
For instance, you can easily find in their web site Dvorak or Dvořák http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/classical/cdreview/composer/antonin-dvorak/), La Boheme or La Bohème, Lévy-Strauss or Levy-Strauss, Bjork or Björk, Slavoj Zizek or Žižek, etc... NYT is generally more coherent, so it is probably only a editorial policy, nothing about journalists skills.

About non Latin alphabet languages, there is usually an official romanisation, which explain that now we read Mao Zedong (simplification from Pinyin Máo Zédōng, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin) instead Mao Tsé-toung, Mao Tsé-Tung or Mao Tsö-Tong.

In any case, if some in BBC have the possibility to write "El niño" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/el_nino.shtml), I agree with Quico, it is fair to expect they write correctly the name of Piñera, Chávez or Erdoğan.

NB: With my spanish keyboard is easy to write é, á, ö or ñ. But I had no problems with ō, ğ, Ž or ř, even with my coarse Windows OS.

same problem here in sweden... they really butcher our language.

indeed the ñ and Ñ is alot more easy to do.. since all keyboard layout i know of has the tilde sign.. so you just hit it before you do the n. but also most keyboard layouts have the two dots as well, which you hit before the actual key.

so they often write soderstrom instead of söderström (which doesnt really sound right at all..) when the correct way of writing it without the ö os soederstroem etc.

It's a pet peeve, sure, but would it kill the BBC to put a tilde over the Ñ in Sebastián Piñera's name?

In a word, ño.

ño joda. Hilario, pues.