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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#121

Post by thaumasiotes »

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…

> Turning 'ti' to /ʃ/ is a fairly normal affricatization

It can't be an affrication, because /ʃ/ is not an affricate. (Although /tj/ is affricated, as /tʃ/ [think "gotcha"] - when you say 'ti', you're referring to words that were pronounced with /s/ rather than /t/.)

Wouldn't /sj/ -> /ʃ/ usually just be called "palatalization"?

(The specific phenomenon in the context of English appears to be called "yod-coalescence".)

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#122

Post by qsort »

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…

Well, that's because they're really languages and not dialects! They all derive from Latin, there is no "old Italian" or anything, at some point we decided the Florentine "dialect", having the most literary prestige, would be standard Italian.

Italians only really started speaking Italian in their day-to-day life after the war. It was mostly a written/literary language before that.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#123

Post by KurSix »

The Godwin vignette at the beginning is such a clever way to dramatize what would otherwise be a dry spelling shift. Also, I never realized the irony that English avoids diacritics because of French influence

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#124

Post by KurSix »

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

To be honest, English orthography is such a Frankenstein's monster of historical layers that even if we did care, untangling it would be a nightmare

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#125

Post by krige »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #46
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.

> though its use may mark the author as among the agèd Thirtysomething here. I use diaeresis (a/k/a diæresis) over e.g. coöperate. It’s more concise than a hyphen. And it makes more sense than cooperate, given cooper is a word.

Thirtysomething here too. I see a diaeresis in naïve often enough to remember that it happens yet uncommon enough to be taken by surprise anyway.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#127

Post by KurSix »

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.

So we can use them if you're feeling fancy or writing for The New Yorker

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#128

Post by thaumasiotes »

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…

> 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

Note that the prevalence of native words in German is the result of a modern reform movement, not something that happened naturally within the language.

> [English] never really adopted foreign grammar

There's the argument that do-support is borrowed from Celtic.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#129

Post by KurSix »

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.

But I think its global dominance has more to do with historical and economic factors than linguistic flexibility

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#130

Post by dkdbejwi383 »

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.

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

is there no accent variation in Spanish?

Such a 1:1 system would never work in English, because the way words are pronounced can be very different in e.g. Melbourne, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Boston, for example.

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