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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#31

Post by eahm »

French.. you people have no idea how Italy is.

I speak differently than my brothers because I grew up at my grandparents 3 MILES! away and if I go to my family restaurant 2 MILES the other direction there is a different accent again, and I mean different words too not just the sound. Where I used to go to school 10 miles away they don't understand if I speak my dialect because it's a different region.

The whole Italy is like that, a different dialect every 2-3 miles, every family, town, city, province, county and region has different accents and ways to make food and recipes. My town is 3200 years old, older than the Romans, they used to fight, then ally then fight again with them etc., this dialect thing is very old, cultures, traditions and families.

Of course we have the Italian language in common and the main dialects are separated by the main city of the region then by the region itself but yep, that's how it is.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#32

Post by teleforce »

catlikesshrimp wrote: post #9
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.

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

Chinese is hard in unnecessary way both in language speaking and writing. I've got the impression that they make in unnecessary hard so only certain people can operate the language and work in government or I call it the elite mentality. I've got the same impression about complex programming languages for examples C++ and Rust. The languages are so complex that you cannot even make the compiler fast [1].

Spoken mandarin has 5 tones but the original ancient Chinese is similar to Cantonese and it has 7 tones. The modern Chinese writing characters is considered simplified because in Taiwan they use the original and more complex Chinese characters.

Fun facts King Sejong of Korea actually get rid of the cumbersome Chinese characters for writing Korean languages and introduced new Korean characters Hangul in 15th CE [2[. It's reported Korean literacy rate skyrocketed in a very short time because it's much easier and suited the Korean language better. Another fun facts, Korean characters can be learnt overnight but you need to memorize and understand several thousands of Chinese characters just to read and understand the newspaper headlines in Chinese. I have a Chinese friend who has Chinese mother tongue and is a well accomplished senior engineer but he cannot even read Chinese newspapers since he did not has a formal education in Chinese writing system.

As Einstein famously remark you should make it simple but not simpler.

[1] Why is the Rust compiler so slow? (425 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44390488

[2] Hangul:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#33

Post by lenzm »

dijit wrote: post #11
boredatoms wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is currently popular because money is always popular

This elides a lot of history, despite being glib it's mostly correct. If English wasn't as easy to learn as it is, it would have been destroyed though. The absolute selling point of English is the fact that since it has no proper rules it's the "glue" of European languages, it's the bash of human linguistics. Ugly, crude, nearly impossible to master if you're not using it daily and all it really does is pin together…

> the hollywood propaganda machine - and it owes about 90% of it's success to that

Who's being glib now? Most people learn English because it's means making more money - in technology, finance, tourism, ...

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#34

Post by schoen »

nlawalker wrote: post #15
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.

Learning the relationship between a diæresis and a diphthong and then seeing that the word diæresis contains a diphthong has rounded out my day nicely, thanks for that.

I enjoyed learning recently that the most common diacritics in Czech are the háček and the čárka. The word "háček" has a čárka followed by a háček, while the word "čárka" has a háček followed by by a čárka!

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#35

Post by nicoburns »

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.

That seems like a quirk of the magazine for thsie pstticular words, but its more common for some others like "naïve" and "Zoë", although that's gone out of fashion somewhat since computers took over (and I believe both of those are loan words in english)

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#36

Post by jcranmer »

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

That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules [1], and trying to make 'fish' come out of ghoti requires breaking them. 'gh' only occurs as an /f/ sound when it occurs at the end of a syllable; as an initial consonant cluster, it's invariably /g/. Turning 'ti' to /ʃ/ is a fairly normal affricatization, which requires a subsequent vowel, which is lacking here (consider words like 'ratio', 'gracious', or 'nation'). Even turning the 'o' into /ɪ/ relies on fairly regular vowel destressing, which there's no reason to expect in 'ghoti'--which should be pronounced per English rules, pretty unambiguously, like goatee.

There are some real issues with English spelling, like the inconsistency of pronouncing 'ea' as /i/ or /ɛ/ (consider, uh, read and read). But 'ghoti' isn't one of them, because that's a case where there's not a lot of ambiguity in English pronunciation.

[1] The worst offenders in English pronunciation are when English borrows foreign words both with foreign pronunciations and foreign spellings.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#37

Post by nicoburns »

lenzm wrote: post #33
dijit wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This elides a lot of history, despite being glib it's mostly correct. If English wasn't as easy to learn as it is, it would have been destroyed though. The absolute selling point of English is the fact that since it has no proper rules it's the "glue" of European languages, it's the bash of human linguistics. Ugly, crude, nearly impossible to master if you're not using it daily and all it really does is pin together…

> the hollywood propaganda machine - and it owes about 90% of it's success to that Who's being glib now? Most people learn English because it's means making more money - in technology, finance, tourism, ...

That probably depends where you live. A lot of Nordic people tell me the learnt English as a kid watching cartoons, long before they were thinking of such things.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#38

Post by dmurray »

teleforce wrote: post #32
catlikesshrimp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Chinese is hard in unnecessary way both in language speaking and writing. I've got the impression that they make in unnecessary hard so only certain people can operate the language and work in government or I call it the elite mentality. I've got the same impression about complex programming languages for examples C++ and Rust. The languages are so complex that you cannot even make the compiler fast [1]. Spoken manda…

> Chinese is hard in unnecessary way both in language speaking and writing.

Is spoken Mandarin really "hard in an unnecessary way"? I think it's quite straightforward, except for the tones. The tones are difficult for anyone who isn't a native speaker of a tonal language. But they are trivial to learn as a child, and easy to learn for native speakers of say Thai (a mostly unrelated language that also happens to use tones). Uneducated people in all walks of life speak both Mandarin and their local dialect well.

Written Chinese really is objectively difficult, and it's a believable argument that before Mao it was intentionally gatekept that way to have a caste of intellectual "elites".

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#39

Post by gwervc »

teleforce wrote: post #26
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 pro…

Plus there is another 1/3 coming from Latin which French speakers has no issue understanding either. English is basically akin to a dumbed down pidgin of French (exponentially less verb conjugation, no gender agreement, less pronouns with the thou/you merge, less articles and annoying small words, etc.) starting over a Germanic core.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#40

Post by madcaptenor »

duskwuff wrote: post #16
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.

Similarly, a grave accent is sometimes used in poetry to indicate that a single vowel is voiced - e.g. in "cursèd" to indicate that the word should be pronounced as two syllables "curse-ed", rather than a single syllable "curst". Loanwords often retain their accents as well: cliché, façade, doppelgänger, jalapeño.

But it's habanero, not habañero - people mistakenly put the ñ by analogy with jalapeño.
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