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You can potentially replace them with digraphs if the digraphs aren't used for some other purpose, which some Esperantists have done with the x-method, like gxis for ĝis 'until', although some people find that quite ugly. An interesting example to me is that pinyin uses the diacritical marks to mark tones in Chinese, which can be hard to type on a limited system but also hard for Chinese learners to remember. The Gwoyeu_Romatzyh system has different spellings for each vowel depending on the associated tone! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_in_Gwoyeu_Romatzyh#To... This is presumably harder to learn but easier for learners to remember. Similarly, Finnish uses double letters to mark a long vowel as opposed to the ā, like maa 'country' which other languages might write as mā. On the other hand, are also vowels ä and ö which are different from a and o, so to find a way to spell Finnish without these marks one would need to find some unused digraph, which might actually be a big challenge, since Wikipedia says > The Germanic umlaut or convention of considering digraph ae equivalent to ä, and oe equivalent to ö is inapplicable in Finnish. Moreover, in Finnish, both ae and oe are vowel sequences, not single letters, and they have independent meanings (e.g. haen "I seek" vs. hän "he, she"). If one wanted to write Spanish without the accent marks, it might be possible to find digraph equivalents, such as maybe ou for ó (which is a problem in "estadounidense" but almost nowhere else!). The ñ could be written with nh as in Portuguese (señor/senhor). |
From what I remember from high school Spanish, there is a default syllable that has an “invisible accent” on its vowel in a Spanish word without accents and the purpose of an accent is to change the syllable that gets emphasized.