Hello aea365 friends. My name is Sharon Rodriguez and I regularly work with international colleagues from other parts of the world. One challenge that we encounter is representing diacritics in reports and presentations (and even emails – but note that the suggestions below won’t work in all email programs). You can usually get these in your document by using an insert function, but for me this changes the flow of my thinking as I type and is slow. My shortcuts are related to inserting diacritics through just using keystrokes. When I started using these, they too were a bit slow, but now I can make them right in the flow of my typing.
Lesson Learned – What is a diacritic: According to Merriam Webster’s, a diacritic is “a mark near or through an orthographic or phonetic character or combination of characters indicating a phonetic value different from that given the unmarked or otherwise marked element.” Accents are common diacritics.
Hot Tip – Create an acute accent (one slanting upward)
- On a PC – hold down the ctrl key and type an apostrophe (‘), release both keys and type a, e, i, o or u – and you get á, é, í, ó, ú.
- On a Mac – hold down the option key and type an e (the letter e – regardless of the letter to which you want to add an accent), release both keys and type a, e, i, o, or u.
Hot Tip – Create a grave accent (one slanting downward)
- On a PC or Mac – hold down the ctrl key and the shift key and type a caret (`) – this can be found on most keyboards to the left of the 1 on the top row, release both keys and type a, e, i, o or u – and you get à, è, ì, ò, ù.
Hot Tip – Create a circumflex accent (one looking a bit like a pointy hat)
- On a PC – hold down the ctrl key and the shift key and type a caret (^), release both keys and type a, e, i, o or u – and you get â, ê, î, ô, û.
- On a Mac – hold down the option key and the shift keys then type an i (the letter i), release both keys and type a, e, i, o, or u.
Hot Tip – Create a tilde (one looking like a wave)
- On a PC – hold down the ctrl key and the shift key and type a tilde (~), release both keys and type a, n, or o – and you get ã, ñ, õ,
- On a Mac – hold down the option key and type an n (the letter n), release both keys and type a, n, or o.
Hot Tip – Same thing for caps: The above options all work for caps as well!
Rad Resource – More Comprehensive List: There are a number of sites with lists of all diacriticals and how to make them – including ones that are not listed here. I’ve found the one at Carnegie Mellon’s Modern Language Resource Center to be quite useful, to cover French, German, Italian, and Spanish, to include both Mac and PC, and to be fairly comprehensive. http://ml.hss.cmu.edu/mlrc/links/keyboardhelp.html
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