Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why English doesn't use accents

deadlanguagesociety.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 615 posts

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#51

Post by yongjik »

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 absolute selling point of English is the fact that since it has no proper rules ...

Anyone who thinks English has "no proper rules" clearly has never had the joy of learning English as a second language.

(Or maybe they have a really warped notion of what "formal rules" mean when it comes to languages. There are no natural human languages in the world that are dictated by formal rules. All formal rules are after-the-fact descriptions devised to explain the language that is already there.)

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#52

Post by acheron »

jonathanlb wrote: post #25
ayende wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 'Fra…

Yes, the “Franks” in “lingua franca” were mostly Italians.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#53

Post by shiroiuma »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #30
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…

>Many native english speaker here like to fantasize on the superiority of other cultures / languages

Some languages really are a lot better than English as far as mapping between spellings and pronunciations. French just isn't one of them; as you pointed out, it's possibly even worse.

I point to German as the superior European language in this regard. I learned some in high school. I can't speak conversationally any more, but I know the pronunciation rules, so if I can read it, I can say it and pronounce it well enough for a German speaker to understand me, even though I don't understand it myself.

That said, German is a nightmare compared to English because of the grammatical complexity (cases etc.), but for pronunciation in relation to spelling, it's excellent. The written form really does reflect the spoken form accurately.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#54

Post by papichulo2023 »

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…

As a non native, it still bothers me how "toward" is pronounced, "toord", really?

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#55

Post by mousethatroared »

degun wrote: post #47
jcranmer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But English orthography isn't meant to serve foreigners.

Im ESL, I struggled with English spelling as much as the next latin speaker who's already learned to read and write in foreigner.

But now that I get the reason behind it, I love it. I consider English orthography worthy of UNESCO protection, even. In fact, I am annoyed at the regular spelling of my two latin languages that have left so much history behind.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#56

Post by gatlin »

papichulo2023 wrote: post #54
jcranmer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a non native, it still bothers me how "toward" is pronounced, "toord", really?

come to texas and experience a whole universe of dipthongs (one of which remedies this)

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#57

Post by mousethatroared »

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.

You're not wrong, except the technological reason. As I understand it, English lost a lot of characters when the movable type printing press was created.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#58

Post by racingmars »

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.

I don't remember ever seeing that in The Economist.

I think you're thinking of New Yorker magazine, perhaps?

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#59

Post by jojobas »

papichulo2023 wrote: post #54
jcranmer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a non native, it still bothers me how "toward" is pronounced, "toord", really?

It's not, unless you're a yankee. They're going to hear you're a foreigner anyway, might as well speak Queen's English.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#60

Post by Tagbert »

papichulo2023 wrote: post #54
jcranmer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a non native, it still bothers me how "toward" is pronounced, "toord", really?

‘W’ started out as a long ‘U’ so it’s not unreasonable
Post reply on HN