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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#21

Post by forinti »

dijit wrote: post #13
Affric wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If what it depends on is the language then thats trivial.

Why is it trivial? The ä and a sounds in Swedish and Finnish are swapped; and they're direct neighbours (with compulsory education for Swedish in Finland, no less).

But within each language it is well defined.

Between languages, even the letters have different uses. Diacritics can be used to signal a different sound or the tonicity of the word (at least in the languages I know those are the two uses).

I don't understand what this thread is all about. English doesn't need accents because there's no universal meaning attached to each one? That doesn't make sense.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#22

Post by OneMorePerson »

andy99 wrote: post #6

I 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.

Is it the case that it encodes no information, or is it the case that the information is somehow..."optional"? I know I selectively ignore unintentionally snarky or sarcastic tones from non native English speakers. Even the simple example of turning "ok" into "oook" can be used to imply someone is being unreasonable.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#23

Post by mk_stjames »

andy99 wrote: post #6

I 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.

Another way of saying this is that spoken English has a lot of inbuilt, inherent error correct-ability, ala a very large minimum Hamming distance between spoken words/phrases.

I always found French to be very much the opposite in spoken form, due to the 'consonnes finales muettes' and liaison and élision, along with the large amount of homonyms and general colloquialism used in everyday speech. Yet in written form, it is nearly as straightforward as English, as you get back those damn letters that aren't being spoken.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#24

Post by ww520 »

porphyra wrote: post #8

The 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.

Used to just be a dash, like re-elect. Cooperate was co-operate. People got tired of writing dashes and they got shortened.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#25

Post by jonathanlb »

ayende wrote: post #10
andy99 wrote: post #6

I 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)

Former linguistics major here. Interestingly, 'lingua franca' originally referred to a specific pidgin trade language spoken in the Mediterranean. The 'franca' part referred to the Franks, who were originally a Germanic tribe that established kingdoms in what is now France and much of western Europe. By the late Byzantine period, 'Franks' had become a blanket term for all Western Europeans. What happened to both 'Franks' and eventually to 'lingua franca' is an example of semantic broadening.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#26

Post by teleforce »

andy99 wrote: post #6

I 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.

Fun facts almost one third (1/3) of English language vocabulary are similar to French. To be exact most of the professional and legal version of the English words are taken from French. Hence if you understand English, you can read short notice or announcement in French, and understand them mostly. But if you have people spoken the same notice and announcement in French version to you without you reading it, most probably you won't understand most of the same sentences.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#27

Post by OJFord »

It does sometimes, though its use may mark the author as among the agèd.

Not to mention loanwords, which of course English is full of, and are sometimes considered properly spelt with their original accents, though many will spell them naïvely without.

Diphthongs too, especially in British English, are not just an archæological find, though out of pragmatism usually written digitally with two separate characters.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#28

Post by kps »

bawolff wrote: post #3
mikequinlan wrote: post #2

Clearly 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".

Yes, this was explicitly called out in the ASCII standard, and is the reason ASCII has ~ (in place of the proposed ‾) and ‘^’ (which replaced the ‘↑’ in the original 1963 version).

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#29

Post by knome »

amelius wrote: post #12

English doesn't use accents because the speakers don't give a __ about the correspondence between the written form and the pronunciation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

ghoti is a ridiculous example. it takes its components entirely out of context. 'gh' as 'f' only occurs at the end of a syllable, 'ti' as 'sh' only exists as part of '-tion' where the pronunciation slurred over time. Pretending it says anything about the nature of the English language outside of English being a complex merging of various other languages that has evolved with time is silly.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#30

Post by TacticalCoder »

Dwedit wrote: post #4

Diacritics aren't unambiguous, there are different conventions for using them. What sound does "ā" make? It depends.

Many native english speaker here like to fantasize on the superiority of other cultures / languages but what good are diacritics for when there are still a shitload of letters that have no diacritics and can be pronounced in different ways?

For example let's take french... A cat is a "chat" but you don't pronounced the 't'. Oh but in "chatte" (pussycat or pussy), you pronounce the t's. While in other words in french you pronounced the 't', like in "table" (yup, it means a table btw).

Speaking of which, the 'e' in "le chat" isn't pronounced the same as the mostly (but not entirely) silent 'e' in "table".

No diacritics on these 'e' here and yet they've got different pronunciations.

Don't come and say: "but that's only with silent letters". Definitely not. "elle" (she) and "le" (the)... Different pronunciation for these three e's.

I've got better: "les fils" (the sons) vs "les fils" (the cables). Exact same spelling. But in one you pronounce the 's', in the other you don't.

Wait, even better: "le fils" (the son) vs "les fils" (the sons). Same pronunciation for "fils", no plural or singular: just one word with a 's' at the end.

Stop romanticizing about french: it probably has more exceptions and weirdness than english.

And you probably don't want to get me started on the average reading and writing skills in elementary and secondary schools in France. It's in freefall so the whole point is kinda moot: the digital natives can't use diacritics properly in french. Heck, many can't even (and don't want to) speak proper french. The language is becoming simpler and simpler, dumber and dumber.

Source: I'm a native french speaker.

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