Why English doesn't use accents
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Why English doesn't use accents
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Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#2Clearly the early scribes were looking forward to the 7-bit ASCII code and needed to reduce the number of characters that were represented.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#3Clearly the early scribes were looking forward to the 7-bit ASCII code and needed to reduce the number of characters that were represented.
If you go early enough, my understanding is that people would write accents in ascii by doing:
e '
Which was called "overstriking".
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#4Diacritics aren't unambiguous, there are different conventions for using them. What sound does "ā" make? It depends.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#5Diacritics aren't unambiguous, there are different conventions for using them. What sound does "ā" make? It depends.
If what it depends on is the language then thats trivial.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#6I have a theory that English is popular because pronunciation encodes almost no information so it works well regardless of accent. Some asian languages, and even French, heavily depend on tone for understanding so are tougher for non-native speakers to communicate in. Butchered English can still be generally understood, thus it's position as lingua franca.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#7I have a theory that English is popular because pronunciation encodes almost no information so it works well regardless of accent. Some asian languages, and even French, heavily depend on tone for understanding so are tougher for non-native speakers to communicate in. Butchered English can still be generally understood, thus it's position as lingua franca.
English is currently popular because money is always popular
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#8The Economist magazine uses a diæresis (two dots) in words like “coöperate” and “reëlect” to indicate that both vowels are pronounced separately, rather than as a diphthong. This is considered old-school and uncommon though.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#9I have a theory that English is popular because pronunciation encodes almost no information so it works well regardless of accent. Some asian languages, and even French, heavily depend on tone for understanding so are tougher for non-native speakers to communicate in. Butchered English can still be generally understood, thus it's position as lingua franca.
Chinese doesn't use accents, but the characters are extremely complicated in comparison. The chacters are both the images and the specific strokes which draw the image.
Spoken Chinese has at least five tones (1,2,3,4,5 Number five stands for neutral) but to native speakers there is much nuance.
I won't explain the reason of its popularity. Someone braver than I may do it. Grammar is very simple, by the way
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#10I have a theory that English is popular because pronunciation encodes almost no information so it works well regardless of accent. Some asian languages, and even French, heavily depend on tone for understanding so are tougher for non-native speakers to communicate in. Butchered English can still be generally understood, thus it's position as lingua franca.
French was the lingua franca for a very long time (pun intended)