Ai blív ingliš šud imbreis diakritiks, ounli daunsaid ai sí is it wud spel dí end of speling bí kompetišns. Pun intendid.
Czech diacritics taking over the world :-)
Why English doesn't use accents
171–180 of 615 posts
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Why not use it for the "tch" sound? (Which, btb, is different than the "ch" sound.) What are you thinking of? There is no difference between those things. But your major point here is correct; on the fundamentals there is no reason for the English alphabet to feature a Q. > "C" is about the same -- by itself it always sounds exactly like "k" or "s". Why not use it for the "ts" sound? With the modern alphabet there'…
> What are you thinking of? There is no difference between those things.
I'm talking about pinyin here. In Mandarin, there are to distinct sounds, one represented in pinyin by 'q', and one by 'ch'. It took me months to hear the difference, and months more to be able to pronounce them properly. I think there are other romanizations where the 'q' sound is represented "tch".
(In fact, I'm inclined to think that there are actually two different sounds in English as well; "witch" and "Charlie" don't feel the same in my mouth.)
> Technically the only voiced consonants in pinyin are m / n / ng / l / r.
I think we're using different definitions of "voiced". Other voiced / unvoiced pairs in English include g/k, b/p, v/f, z/s. See [1] for an "official" example of "voiced" being used the way I'm using it.
How else would you describe the difference between "qu" and "ju", or "chou" and "zhou"? The only difference I can feel is when your vocal cords turn on.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#173French.. 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…
In 6th grade, so back in 1982, I read the French SF novel "Malevil". I was astounded (speaking as a US kid here), to learn that French people born and raised in France didn't natively speak French, but instead learned their regional language. Here is an example, from https://archive.org/details/malevilmerl00merl/page/150/mode/... : > And besides, Thomas was already quite isolated enough as it was: by his youth, by hi…
> I was astounded (speaking as a US kid here), to learn that French people born and raised in France didn't natively speak French, but instead learned their regional language.
As a French person born before 1982, I find this sentence questionable.
If you mean "there were some people who learned a local dialect", then sure, you could dig some up.
If you mean "many regions had dialects that were learned before French", then I believe you misunderstood (or were misled).
Finding anyone who even spoke a regional dialect would've been a novelty, let alone one who grew up speaking it before French.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#174French.. 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.
Yes, surprisingly few Italian dialects are actually Italian derivatives (maybe only a couple?)
But there are differences between a dialect and a language, we can't say all of those are languages even if most come from Latin.
Italian wikipedia says that officially in Italy there are about 13 recognized languages (not counting Italian, plus French and Slovenian in some parts), and about a dozen main dialects.
In wikipedia you will notice 3 big dialect groups that are just that, groups of many, many dialects that do not qualify as languages.
It's more a difference of how recognized by the community those are, and how unified by grammar, locality and uniqueness. Kind of a gray area for many.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#175The 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.
Similarly, a grave accent is sometimes used in poetry to indicate that a single vowel is voiced - e.g. in "cursèd" to indicate that the word should be pronounced as two syllables "curse-ed", rather than a single syllable "curst". Loanwords often retain their accents as well: cliché, façade, doppelgänger, jalapeño.
There’s also the (dying) use of diareses to indicate vowel stress, for example coöperative or naïve.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Also, I never realized the irony that English avoids diacritics because of French influence But is that why they avoid diacritics? It sounds like English probably wouldn't have had diacritics even if the Normans hadn't come in. Seeing my son try to learn to read things like "cycle", I feel like diacritics would make English writing a lot more accessible.
According to the article, Norman influence led to double letters being used to better mark out sounds, which achieves the same as diacritics. It made English mostly good enough (failures like 'lead' are rare). Being good enough, and lacking a strong central authority, the language only accepted a conservative standardisation, and avoided larger changes such as including diacritics. Without these Norman changes, there…
Well, the "lead issue" could be fixed by writing the verb "leed" (after all, it's exactly the same sound as in the word "queen" mentioned in the article), but for some reason this hasn't happened...
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#177I 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…
While ~29% of the dictionary words come from French, in any written or spoken sentence the number falls dramatically. All the small joining words we use and the core of our grammar is Germanic.
See Rob Word's "Is English really a Germanic language?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCE4C9GvqI0
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
This article is about accents on letters (diacritics), not accents as in dialects. I found your post interesting neverthelesss.
It is probably connected. Having so many different dialects (and full minor languages!) saying the same word slightly differently, Italians were forced to find (and use) a way to put the correct accent in writing. Other languages probably don't have the mind boggling number of dialects Italy has. GP was not exaggerating, it really changes every few kilometers. Like the article says: "situations like these are surpris…
Italian script doesn't use diacritics, though, so it's not the same kind of accent as the article talks about.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#179French barely has diacritics.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#180Earlier 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
Hah, Barese sounds like a Frenchman is trying to speak Italian but can't be bothered.