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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#141

Post by kome »

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…

you clearly haven't read the article... they are talking about diacritics (accents) and not inflection of the spoken language.

i find absolutely worrisome that nobody is reading the articles anymore, and they just read the title.

it makes the quality of the discussion very very low.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#142

Post by jamestown44 »

danbolt wrote: post #74
GianFabien wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

me too: 'dialog' is a computer popup; 'dialogue' is a verbal exchange

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#143

Post by gwd »

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.

My son's first year teacher said (I may have the numbers slightly wrong) that Spanish has 23 phonemes (sounds the mouth makes) and 23 graphemes (ways to write sounds). English, on the other hand, has 43 phonemes and over 500 graphemes.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#144

Post by diogolsq »

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.

Portuguese and German are like that.

You’ve never seen the word before, but when reading it for the first time, you’ll probably pronounce it correctly.

English is awful, but French takes the crown on this one—though more because it has the same pronunciation for many different words and written forms.

English, on the other hand, the alphabet doesn’t map well.

Mood and flood both have “oo”, yet each is pronounced differently. You need to know the word beforehand to know exactly how it’s pronounced.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#145

Post by brabel »

asielen wrote: post #79
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…

I see naïve as an example of diacritics in English as well.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#147

Post by dijit »

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…

English regularly violates its own rules and additionally has no correcting body (Swedish has central body that dictates language rules for example).

That's part of why it's so difficult to fully master, and there are rules (sentence structure) for clarity, but there's no actually solid rules for pronunciation (it differs depending on word) or even what words are really proper words (there are central dictionaries that largely agree, but there are also "Hinglish", patois and the other creole dialects).

English steals aggressively from other languages, since that's its history. Other languages might borrow some words but there's multiple branches of these inside english. You can use English with only latin-root words, or English with only Germanic-root words and both are as valid english as each other.

Easy to learn; awful to master.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#148

Post by gwd »

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?!

Pinyin was written by Chinese speakers for Chinese speakers. There are other romanizations written by westerners, and these are easier to see where the sounds come from; e.g., "tsai" rather than "cai".

What use is "q" as a letter at all in English? It makes a "k" sound and always occurs with a "u" after it. Why not use it for the "tch" sound? (Which, btb, is different than the "ch" sound.)

"C" is about the same -- by itself it always sounds exactly like "k" or "s". Why not use it for the "ts" sound?

As for "zhou" -- in English, z is very similar to an s, but voiced. So in pinyin, zh is just like ch, but voiced.

Lots of languages do this BTW. When people from Wycliffe want to translate a Bible into an obscure language without a writing system, they first have to invent a writing system. They could invent all new characters, but why? All it would do is make that language hard to type. So they take the sounds that language has, and map them onto Latin characters. Sometimes there's an obvious mapping, sometimes not.

Look up Welsh's spelling for another example of this.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#149

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

I grew up in the province of Friesland [0], which is part of the Frisia cultural region, an area that was not occupied by the Romans back when so it retained some of its identity and culture - although a lot of that was erased by Christian missionaries and subsequent invasions and government takeovers etc etc etc.

Anyway, super local accent changes are a thing there as well, go north a few kilometers from where I grew up and you go from the "woods" to the "clay", which has its own intonation and possibly words. Then there were town specific stereotypes - people from this town will knife you, that town is full of inbreds, etc. That's probably a lot of made-up intentional drama though, lol.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friesland

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisia

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