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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#71

Post by antod »

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?

That's just one accent. Most accents pronounce that W (especially outside the US).

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#72

Post by selectodude »

efilife wrote: post #68
salomonk_mur wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

English lacking a language regulator makes it hard to be a bootlicker for that particular language. Whose boot are they licking?

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#73

Post by JKCalhoun »

efilife wrote: post #68
salomonk_mur wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

What was the poem (song?) that captured many more of these? (Anyone?)

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#74

Post by danbolt »

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.

After enough programming over the years, I feel like my mind has separated the concept of a colour (which I learned as a child) and `Color` data.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#75

Post by megablast »

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…

> 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.

Like what? You have to give us examples.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#76

Post by defrost »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #73
efilife wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What was the poem (song?) that captured many more of these? (Anyone?)

The Chaos (1922) by Gerard Nolst Trenité ?

https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/cha...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw (and others similar)

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#77

Post by wredcoll »

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…

I want to know who thought that chinese transliterated into "english characters" should use a whole bunch of q, x and zs to represent sounds in a way that no other english word does.

Why is Zhou pronounced that way?!

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#78

Post by shagie »

yongjik wrote: post #51
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 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…

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophony#Ablaut-motivated_comp... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication#English

Tic Tac Toe is the one that I remember most easily...

> Examples include: bric-a-brac, chit-chat, clip-clop, ding-dong, flimflam, flip-flop, hip-hop, jibber-jabber, kitty-cat, knick-knack, mishmash, ping-pong, pitter-patter, riffraff, sing-song, slipslop, splish-splash, tick-tock, ticky-tacky, tip-top, whiff-whaff, wibble-wobble, wishy-washy, zig-zag.

Saying any of those in the wrong order sounds wrong to a native ear.

It even shows up in Live, Laugh, Love.

And then there's adjective order... https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/...

--

If people want a language with "proper rules"... head over to conlangs. https://youtu.be/x_x_PQ85_0k https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil is my favorite (I've got a copy of the grammar guide that is on my shelf of random things next to Random Numbers by the RAND corporation).

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#79

Post by asielen »

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 is the fun thing about English. There isn't really a single right way to speak or write it. It is defined by common usage. As long as your audience understands you, it is correct.

As someone else pointed out, loan words often have accents. At what point does jalapeño become en english word? There is no other english word to refer to the pepper, therefore it is now an english word and therefore english words can have diacritics.

The closest thing we have to a source of truth for the english language is the OED. It isn't prescriptive, it just lists how words are used rather than how words should be used.

Jalapeño is in the OED with the tilde https://www.oed.com/dictionary/jalapeno_n?tab=factsheet#1253...

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#80

Post by simondotau »

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?

If you think that’s crazy, consider that “English” is the only word in the English language that spells the /ɪŋ/ (‘ing’) sound as “eng”.
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