Why English doesn't use accents • Hacker News Board

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#81

Post by shagie » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 2:41 AM UTC

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…

During the Norman Conquest, England was ruled by the French... and that is when those words entered the language.

Also from that time was many culinary words. The word for the meat in English is the word for the animal in French (the word for the animal in English is likely germanic in origin). That was in part because the when the French speaking nobility wanted boef (French for cow), they didn't want a cow (German Kuh) - they wanted the meat of a cow. So English got beef. Pork? French asked for porc, but didn't want a swine.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#82

Post by paulmooreparks » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 2:42 AM UTC

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.

The great thing about using Singapore as my locale is that it accepts pretty much any English spelling you throw at it, British or American. You see quite a mix of both on signs and documents here, too.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#83

Post by paulmooreparks » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 2:50 AM UTC

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.

Singlish says, "Hi." It's fascinating to watch that in action here in Singapore, as I find Singlish to be a compact and efficient form of English that greedily borrows words from Mandarin, Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew, Malay, Tamil, and a few other languages to enable rich communication among the various cultures, ethnicities, and language groups found here. It even borrows the grammatical structures of some of those languages, and yet the meaning still gets through. It didn't take me long to get comfortable with it, and it helped me appreciate the promiscuous nature of English even more.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#84

Post by toast0 » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 2:51 AM UTC

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]

> wind, rewind

Wind and rewind are fine. It's just wind and wind are a problem, like read and read.

For example, wind and rewind sound the same in: Rewind that, so I can see him wind up.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#85

Post by jcranmer » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 2:56 AM UTC

wredcoll wrote: post #77

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…

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?!

A few plausible answers to that:

In general, it's not transliteration into English characters, it's transliteration into the Latin alphabet. That means that transliteration tends to be shared across the various European languages that use the Latin alphabet. And given that the English were one of the last powers to actually engage in the naval trade war, they're less likely to be the basis of a major transliteration effort.

In the case of the q and x, I believe it comes from 500-year old Portuguese.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#86

Post by toast0 » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 3:00 AM UTC

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…

I love French. Institutionalized mumbling.

You might not hear the t in chat, but you need to know it's there to pronounce it properly. And especially if there's a vowel starting the next word.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#87

Post by woleium » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 3:01 AM UTC

germandiago wrote: post #70

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 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.

as i understand it, english is actually 3-5 other languages in a trench coat.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#88

Post by paulmooreparks » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 3:02 AM UTC

wredcoll wrote: post #77

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…

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?!

It's best not to think of Hanyu Pinyin as using "English characters" to pronounce Mandarin. It's just a mapping of the initial, medial, and final sounds onto the Latin alphabet in a consistent way, so that once you know the mapping, you know the pronunciation right away, and more practically, you can _type_ it right away.

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

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#89

Post by devman0 » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 3:12 AM UTC

woleium wrote: post #87

germandiago wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

as i understand it, english is actually 3-5 other languages in a trench coat.

Blame the Normans for that one...well English was already kind of a mess, but the the conquest of England by the Normans really sealed the deal.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#90

Post by jcranmer » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 3:13 AM UTC

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]

The best 'defense' of English spelling I'm aware of is https://www.zompist.com/spell.html, which at the end admits:

> I doubt that this page will convince anyone that English spelling is a good system. There's too many oddities. [...] What I hope to have shown, however, is that beneath all the pitfalls, there's a rather clever and fairly regular mechanism at work, and one which still gets the vast majority of words pretty much correct. It's not to modern tastes, but by no means as broken as people think.

Which is to say, English spelling is definitely messed up. But it's not some insane thing that lacks any hint of sanity that some people try to portray it as.