---
title: "The IPA's own 1948 Principles document explicitly instructed that diacritic marks 'should be avoided, being trying for the eyes and troublesome to write'"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://1310591b-811f-4294-29c5-e629a2a14473.filesusr.com/ugd/e93fc6_d6bfa3a285d249218f9fd82bc81c764c.pdf?index=true"
source_title: "Phonetic Notation Systems"
source_author: "Jo Verhoeven and A. Hirson (quoting Principles of the International Phonetic Association, 1948)"
source_date: "2009-01-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "Diacritic marks should be avoided, being trying for the eyes and troublesome to write."
source_tier: 2
source_sha: "36dc1e490ea37c996bd3e73863608e2801af5831e7ad1af60b555874e362c057"
source_venue: "Self-archived updated version of a chapter in J. Verschueren (ed.), Handbook of Pragmatics vol. 13, pp. 1–14, John Benjamins, 2009; hosted on the authors' City, University of London lab site"
audit_status: "capture-verified — the capturing pass read the Verhoeven & Hirson chapter PDF directly at capture time, 2026-08-14; this headless promotion has no network and did not re-fetch. The 1948 Principles quote is read secondhand through Verhoeven & Hirson, not from the 1948 primary itself; cited as such. Tier 2 (secondary quoting a Tier 1 primary). Awaiting the verifier bee's verbatim stamp."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-14-does-a-primary-history-of-linguistics-source-confirm.md, 2026-08-15"
origin: "batch"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-08-14-does-a-primary-history-of-linguistics-source-confirm.md"]
tags: ["history-of-linguistics","notation-systems","phonetics","print-history","standards-wars"]
date_created: "2026-08-15T00:00:00.000Z"
verified_archive: "2026-08-17 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against the CAPTURE-TIME ARCHIVE of source_url (sha256 36dc1e490ea3…), checked offline by seek_verify v1.1 (no model). Live check: nomatch. Evidence class: the quote was faithful to what was read at capture; the live page no longer shows it (drift or death, not fabrication)."
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


The specific feature blamed for [[claim-lepsius-standard-alphabet-failed-to-spread-hard-to-typeset|Lepsius's Standard Alphabet's failure to spread]] — its dense stack of diacritics — is the same feature the successor organization's own founding design rules explicitly told its members to avoid. Jo Verhoeven and A. Hirson, in a chapter on phonetic notation systems, reproduce verbatim one of the original design principles from the *Principles of the International Phonetic Association* (1948):

> "Diacritic marks should be avoided, being trying for the eyes and troublesome to write."

This is the International Phonetic Association stating, as institutional design doctrine, that heavy diacritic use is a fault to be engineered around — on readability ("trying for the eyes") and ease-of-writing ("troublesome to write") grounds. It is not a later historian's critique but the organization's own rule, from the body that produced the notation that displaced the diacritic-heavy universal alphabets of the previous century. It corroborates, from the winning side of the standards contest, the shape of the claim that completeness-via-diacritics loses to usability — the pattern the vault tracks through [[claim-ipa-descends-from-lepsius-via-ellis-palaeotype-and-sweet-romic]], [[claim-war-of-the-dots-competing-braille-systems-1829-1932]], and [[claim-bana-2012-ueb-adoption-kept-nemeth-code-parallel]].

Two caveats scope it. The quote reaches the vault secondhand — read through Verhoeven & Hirson's chapter, not from the 1948 *Principles* document itself — so it is cited as a Tier 2 secondary quoting a Tier 1 primary, not a direct read of the primary. And the 1948 principle names ease of *writing* and *reading*, not typesetting cost specifically; it is adjacent to, not identical with, the print-shop-economics mechanism documented in [[claim-printing-office-type-shortages-constrained-victorian-phonetic-notation]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The satisfying thing here is the symmetry: the vault's Lepsius note says diacritics sank his alphabet, and the IPA — the system that won — wrote "avoid diacritics" into its own founding charter. The loser and the winner agree on the diagnosis. I'd only caution that "trying for the eyes and troublesome to write" is the *readability-and-handwriting* argument, which is a cousin of the *typesetting-cost* argument, not the same one; the print-shop-font story lives in the sister note. Two neighbouring reasons a diacritic loses, and it's worth keeping them distinct rather than letting them blur into one tidy "diacritics are bad" claim. — Seek