Sunday, January 24, 2010

Found the stresica!

Finally! I figured out that pesky little diacritical mark! That little "v" that sits on top of certain letters in Slovene. 

I need it in order to write some of my family names properly: Adamič and Kozlevčar. Or, for that matter, to properly title my welcome to this blog. It should have been like this: dobrodošli. 

It's called a "stresica" in Slovene, which means "little roof." It creates those three additional letters in the Slovene language: š, č, and ž. Pronounced "sh" and "ch" and "zh." 

 I must have spent half a day figuring out how to do this on my nice new Christmas MacBook. No, it's not rocket science. And it's certainly not the biggest hurdle in the Slovene language, which has incredible challenges I won't get into right now. But it took me a long time to figure out.

I thought it would be easy. I already know how to do the French accents, since I use them a lot. It's a simple code, a series of keys, and there you have it. But with that elusive little roof, you first need to alter the keyboard. With the extended US keyboard, you can use a series of keys to create that perky little hat. But I've already forgotten the formula, because now I have a better option: the Slovenian keyboard, which I can flip on whenever I want. So now I can write č and š an ž to my heart's content! I have arrived!