In 1930, most "printing" was done with a typewriter. Most typewriters did not have dead keys (French typewriters had a dedicated key for each accented letter.) Diacritics were thoroughly impractical. Nothing "racist" about it.

Masica *The Indo-Aryan Languages* notes that Konkani uses a hyphen in the middle of a geminate because a doubled letter marks retroflex: <mallo> = /ma:l.o/, <mal-lo> = /ma:llo/ (1991: 153).
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...

----- Original Message ----
From: Don Osborn <dzo@...>
To: qalam@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, September 16, 2007 9:17:42 AM
Subject: Re: "FaYe" - a proposed new script for Yoruba

Hi Peter, all,

Re diacritics, what is the prevailing opinion (if any) among experts
in writing systems? Obviously they are common in many languages for
different purposes and it's just a question of learning them.

The 1930 edition of Practical Orthography of African Languages has
this statement about diacritics:
"For practical purposes in everyday life diacritic marks constitute a
difficulty and a danger."

However that is couched in what reads like a thoroughly colonialist
(read racist) evaluation of capacities of "natives." (See
http://www.bisharat .net/Documents/ poal30.htm and search "diaccritic" )

Re digraphs, I'd also be interested to know what is the dominant
thinking. Digraphs are not all alike from what I see:
* Some are pretty intuitive once you learn the sound system of the
letters (putting a /y/ after an /n/ is easy to sound out as a palatal
n; /s/ after /t/ as whatever one calls /ts/; etc.). Vowel dipthongs
might be under this category.
* Some are by convention (/h/ in particular is thrown into many
situations following another letter where the resulting sound is not
intuitive, but must be memorized as such - e.g., /h/ after /t/ in
English stands for two possible sounds depending on the word). It has
even been promoted as a high tone marker for one or two languages
(i.e., /h/ after a vowel that carries a high tone)
* Ambiguous pairings that could be sounded out different ways (only
example I can think of is /ng/ which is the velar n in English, but a
prenasalized g in others; languages with both a prenasalized g and a
velar n need something else to distinguish, such as the /Å‹/ for the
velar n in many West African languages or the /n'g/ for the
prenasalized g in East Africa.

Long story made short, I'm wondering if some digraph combinations are
less than optimal solutions if one were developing a new orthography.