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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#101

Post by eahm »

emseetech wrote: post #96
eahm wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh geez, for example in Italian to say here you say "qui", where I grew up I say "mchi" but my brothers say "mqui" or "mque", where I used to go to school they say "meque" with the weirdest sound. To say what are you doing in Italian is "cosa fai" but I say "co fei" and my brothers "sa fei" and where I used to go to school they say "che fe". These are just simple simple things but almost everything changes here and t…

I have relatives in Bari so I've been fascinated by Barese. My Italian is not good but I can passively pick it up when listening or watching television, but Barese sounds 100% like a completely different language to me. French and Spanish are more intelligible. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gEKxf8RD-OM

Funny also I moved to USA ~20 years ago and you lose the Italian, you don't remember words etc. but you'll never lose your dialect, it just comes natural because that's how you grew up instead of what you learned growing up and from school, Tuscan people have it easier because the language comes from their dialect, Dante etc.

And to add, I wouldn't click that link if you paid me lol, I hate the Barese... ok I clicked, funny stuff.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#103

Post by jraph »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #67
jraph wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Interesting!

So how do you pronounce comfortable there?

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#104

Post by simondotau »

o11c wrote: post #98
simondotau wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

Eh, not really. "engage", "engorge", "engrave", "engross", "engulf" are all fairly common words that are either often or exclusively pronounced that way (some dictionaries might show /in-g/, but /n/ is really /ŋ/ before g or k, even if they remain). Since these can take prefixes, this also proves we're not limited to being at the start of a word. Searching for words that can be spelled with with "ing" or "eng" finds…

You might be right, but for what it’s worth I’ve literally never heard any of those words pronounced that way. I’ve only ever heard the word “English” start with the same sound as inside, while “engage” and your other examples start with the same sound as entertain.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#105

Post by jandrewrogers »

jraph wrote: post #103
jandrewrogers wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting! So how do you pronounce comfortable there?

In American English, it is common to pronounce it something like “comf-ter-ble” in most dialects. Some dialects of e.g. British English pronounce it as you would expect from the spelling with 4 syllables. I can’t think of an American dialect that pronounces it correctly. Perhaps some New England or Canadian dialects do?

My experience traveling around the English speaking world is that it is very forgiving of pronunciation. What trips you up is differences in vocabulary and semantics. You have to learn a new dictionary and a bit of inexplicable grammar everywhere you travel. I’ve learned very different languages that had similar relationships to adjacent languages; the words are all familiar but the meanings of those words have been remapped to something else. English tends toward a similar pattern.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#106

Post by dmurray »

teleforce wrote: post #49
dmurray wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure, but it's a tiny minority of Chinese learners.

"Hard in an unnecessary way" implies that it's objectively difficult and complex, not just different from what certain outsiders are used to.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#107

Post by xdennis »

o11c wrote: post #98
simondotau wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

Eh, not really. "engage", "engorge", "engrave", "engross", "engulf" are all fairly common words that are either often or exclusively pronounced that way (some dictionaries might show /in-g/, but /n/ is really /ŋ/ before g or k, even if they remain). Since these can take prefixes, this also proves we're not limited to being at the start of a word. Searching for words that can be spelled with with "ing" or "eng" finds…

- English - /ˈɪŋ(ɡ)lɪʃ/

- engage - /ɪnˈɡeɪd͡ʒ/, /ɛnˈɡeɪd͡ʒ/

- engorge - /ɪnˈɡɔːdʒ/

- engross - /ɪnˈɡɹəʊs/, /ɪŋˈɡɹəʊs/, /ɛnˈɡɹoʊs/, /ɛŋˈɡɹoʊs/

- engulf - /ɪŋˈɡʌlf/

According to Wiktionary only engulf and engross also use /ŋ/.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#108

Post by tacker2000 »

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…

This article is about accents on letters (diacritics), not accents as in dialects.

I found your post interesting neverthelesss.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#109

Post by recursivecaveat »

paulmooreparks wrote: post #88
wredcoll wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I used to always think these romanization schemes were really bad, until I realized they were just not for me. The ease of sight-reading and getting the correct pronunciation for a random english speaker is not the goal. It's primarily for the convenience of users of other languages to have a systematic encoding. To make it pronunciation-friendly you would have to have to add a bunch of complexity to the mapping that would compromise its usage by the real audience.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#110

Post by kleiba »

jcranmer wrote: post #92
woleium wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This often gets trotted out, but it's not really true. English is a solidly Germanic language, which merely happened to lose the core attribute of Indo-European languages (extensive verb inflection), and in more recent centuries, there's been a tendency to adopt Latin and Greek words for new word formation rather than (as German did) using native words. So 'technology' instead of 'craftlearn' or 'television' instead…

Let's not downplay the influence that the French language had on English.
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