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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#41

Post by em-bee »

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, ...

we learn english because it is a subject in school. money does not come into consideration for most people. the motivation to teach english in school is another question however. as is the motivation for parents to pay for extra english classes outside of school.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#42

Post by madcaptenor »

schoen wrote: post #34
nlawalker wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

A "calque" is a word that's been brought from one language into another by translating the individual parts. A "loanword" is a word that's been brought over by just taking the word with little modification.

For example, "calque" is a loanword, while "loanword" (from German "Lehnwort") is a calque.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#44

Post by em-bee »

dmurray wrote: post #38
teleforce wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

in addition, chinese grammar is very easy. what makes learning chinese hard is the writing because it is difficult in itself and you can't use it to reinforce the learning of spoken words or vice versa.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#45

Post by FridayoLeary »

gwervc wrote: post #39
teleforce wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Harsh but that rings true. In it's defense i'll point out that English is exponentially more useful in the modern world and even French has started borrowing nouns from English. Also English has more words then any other language which in my mind makes it the best. (to clarify i know a little of other languages and i understand that there are concepts which English is not even equipped to express properly but i stand by what i write)

I'm still learning, English is huge and it can be a delight to discover.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#46

Post by JumpCrisscross »

OJFord wrote: post #27

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.

> though its use may mark the author as among the agèd

Thirtysomething here. I use diaeresis (a/k/a diæresis) over e.g. coöperate. It’s more concise than a hyphen. And it makes more sense than cooperate, given cooper is a word.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#47

Post by degun »

jcranmer wrote: post #36
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 wo…

The explanation you gave is already contained in the cited Wikipedia article. I think this "ghoti" example is more of a tongue-in-cheek mocking of pronunciation inconsistencies. If you want a jarring example, consider laughter and slaughter. I know, i know, they have different origins, but still, it confuses foreigners like me while learning the language.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#48

Post by em-bee »

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).

not just neighbors by country. a not insignificant proportion of finns speak swedish natively

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#49

Post by teleforce »

dmurray wrote: post #38
teleforce wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

>The tones are difficult for anyone who isn't a native speaker of a tonal language

That's the the majority of the world's population.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#50

Post by salomonk_mur »

knome wrote: post #29
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.

Read and read are the same exact fucking letters and are pronounced differently. You really don't need to go very far to find many examples.

English is fucked up. The only way to learn how to speak it properly is by memorization.

Other languages like Spanish or Korean keep a near-perfect one to one correspondence between written form and expected pronunciation.

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