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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#61

Post by GianFabien »

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.

On the internet the most marked issue is the difference between British English spellings (England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and the USA. It is frustrating that on most spell checked text boxes words like: harbour, labour, actualise, etc shown as misspelt.

I find it most irksome that the Australian Labor Party has chosen the USA spelling in spite of being part of the Commonwealth.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#62

Post by jraph »

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…

> it probably has more exceptions and weirdness than english.

Pronunciation-wise, I doubt it. All your examples have English counterparts.

Consider eleven (the vowel sounds for the same letter), psychology (silent p), wind / rewind, many irregular verbs (like read, read, read), Wednesday and business (many letters are just not/weirdly pronounced), history and litterature (one fewer syllable than expected), the complex rules to pronounce the ed + exceptions... You basically have to know how an English word is pronounced to pronounce it correctly. Guessing works but only so far, and I believe less than for French (and I'm a French speaker too).

I have a close friend from the US who likes to make fun of the French language, but when I cite English, he says oh yeah, but for English we already know that! :-)

Anyway, English and French are both quite bad at this, and you are right, that's nothing to be proud about. It's just a reality we have to deal with.

> The language is becoming simpler and simpler, dumber and dumber.

Simpler is not dumber and I absolutely don't think the language is becoming dumber. The last reform (1990) brings more regularity and this is most welcome, freeing us time for things that actually matter, making the language more accessible to foreigners as well as people with conditions like dyslexia or dysorthography and less a status tool. I welcome the French language becoming more welcoming.

Or please strongly back your dumber and dumber statement. Because usually that's just baseless, tired rambling from clueless conservative people saying such things. A French speciality (a national sport even, championed by the Figaro?).

> 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

That too. Maybe you should fix your English before lamenting on the writing skills of people, because you are making a lot of basic language mistakes in this very comment in which you are doing this. That's harsh and not nice, but that's what you are seemingly doing to others and I want to take the opportunity to make you feel what it may feel like. Actually, you probably cannot even begin to imagine how you may sound like to people for whom writing is a struggle. Such people often feel ashamed because of people like you. Let's just be forgiving, tolerant, more empathetic and stop using language skills as status and start focusing on the content.

I have a close acquaintance who expresses themself perfectly, only writing without mistakes is hard for them. They even have an official disability recognition for their strong dyslexia (so they can have a related tool on their workstation). Let's just cut people some slack on their writing skills (which are in the vast majority not related to laziness - or maybe you are suggesting people are dumber and dumber?) and the world will be a better place.

See also [1] for a nuanced discussion on "Writing skills are lower and lower". It turns out it's partly due to more people going to school and not only the elite, which is a good thing, including children whose first language is not French and whose life in general may likely be a bit more complicated than the one of a random privileged French child (like I was).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8SJ6v2A0qU&t=120 (in French)

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#63

Post by mousethatroared »

eahm wrote: post #31

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…

And it's great.

My HS Italian teacher's university thesis was on the different dialects within Naples and their various (ancient) Greek origins.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#64

Post by OJFord »

GianFabien wrote: post #61
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.

On the internet the most marked issue is the difference between British English spellings (England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and the USA. It is frustrating that on most spell checked text boxes words like: harbour, labour, actualise, etc shown as misspelt. I find it most irksome that the Australian Labor Party has chosen the USA spelling in spite of being part of the Commonwealth.

Did you mean misspelled

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#65

Post by jandrewrogers »

FridayoLeary wrote: post #45
gwervc wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most words in foreign languages that most people believe don’t have an English equivalent often do, but the English word is so obscure that almost no native English speaker knows it, and as you point out, English vocabulary is so large that no one will ever come close to learning it all. English is the C++ of human languages.

What interests me is the prominence of words in foreign languages that have an extremely obscure equivalent in English. Like, why do they devote common vocabulary to it and what does it mean that they do?

I have been conversational in languages almost no one learns from parts of the world no one cares about. They are full of words like this and I still use those words in English because that was the first word I learned for the concept. But when I’ve taken the time to see if an equivalent English word exists, it always does. Ironically, it is safer to assume that my ignorance of the English language (my native language) is more likely than the lack of a word in English for a thing.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#66

Post by jraph »

shiroiuma wrote: post #53
TacticalCoder wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Spanish seems quite decent in both of these aspects.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#67

Post by jandrewrogers »

jraph wrote: post #62
TacticalCoder wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> it probably has more exceptions and weirdness than english. Pronunciation-wise, I doubt it. All your examples have English counterparts. Consider eleven (the vowel sounds for the same letter), psychology (silent p), wind / rewind, many irregular verbs (like read, read, read), Wednesday and business (many letters are just not/weirdly pronounced), history and litterature (one fewer syllable than expected), the comple…

FWIW, both “history” and “literature” have the number syllables you would expect in my dialect of English (Western American), at least among people I know. But I know exactly what you are talking about! Many regional dialects drop the “o” in history and the first “e” in literature.

On the other hand, we do violence to the pronunciation of “comfortable”. I’ve lived in so many parts of the English speaking world that I can partially code switch pronunciation for some dialects. Kind of weird but not that bad.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#68

Post by efilife »

salomonk_mur wrote: post #50
knome wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#69

Post by teleforce »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #65
FridayoLeary wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most words in foreign languages that most people believe don’t have an English equivalent often do, but the English word is so obscure that almost no native English speaker knows it, and as you point out, English vocabulary is so large that no one will ever come close to learning it all. English is the C++ of human languages. What interests me is the prominence of words in foreign languages that have an extremely obs…

> English is the C++ of human languages

You can say that again.

That's exactly what I'm alluding in my other comments thread but referring to Chinese language and writing system complexity rather than English for the C++ and Rust, but on second thought Rust probably be the Chinese equivalent.

> But when I’ve taken the time to see if an equivalent English word exists, it always does.

It's the same happen with C++ that has been ripping up Dlang features for quite sometimes now including its new module system [1].

[1] Converting a large mathematical software package written in C++ to C++20 modules (42 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44433899

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#70

Post by germandiago »

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 spanish I could say the most challenging part of english is the lack of consistency between how you write something and how you pronounce it.

Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it.

English is a bit messy regarding to this, for whatever reasons.

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