02-10-2020, 05:13 PM
Just to give an example of what would be a tolerable amount of ambiguity in a West Slavic language written without the diacritical marks, I can present here a few examples from a message written by a Czech scholar in Czech. Clearly he typed the message on a keyboard without the diacritical marks available, but he still had no problem doing so and clearly did not expect other Czech speakers to have any problem in understanding his message.
For the Czech word "Vážený", he simply wrote "Vazeny"
For the Czech word "přátelskými", he simply wrote "pratelskymi"
For the Czech word "Váš", he simply wrote "Vas"
And so on for the entire message. Formally this simplified writing method introduces ambiguity into the meaning of the words: "Váš" means 'your', while "Vas" means 'you' in the accusative case. But the context makes the meaning completely clear to any Czech speaker.
And Czech is a language that is famous for the phonemic precision of its diacritical marks! And yet an obviously highly educated native speaker and scholar of the language has no problem at all omitting the diacritical marks entirely. He did not even feel the need to include a diacritical mark in the spelling of his own surname.
For the Czech word "Vážený", he simply wrote "Vazeny"
For the Czech word "přátelskými", he simply wrote "pratelskymi"
For the Czech word "Váš", he simply wrote "Vas"
And so on for the entire message. Formally this simplified writing method introduces ambiguity into the meaning of the words: "Váš" means 'your', while "Vas" means 'you' in the accusative case. But the context makes the meaning completely clear to any Czech speaker.
And Czech is a language that is famous for the phonemic precision of its diacritical marks! And yet an obviously highly educated native speaker and scholar of the language has no problem at all omitting the diacritical marks entirely. He did not even feel the need to include a diacritical mark in the spelling of his own surname.