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Why English doesn't use accents

deadlanguagesociety.com

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#191

Post by richrichardsson »

> This is why English has combinations like sh, th, ee, oo, ou that each make only a single sound.

Struggling with the th and ou here as only making a single sound.

Through and rough, both not the same ou as sound.

That and Thames, but this might be becaues Thames is proper noun?

The only thing I like about Croatian is that there is none of this nonsense. If you understand the letters and how to pronounce them, you can read a word and pronounce it correctly. In English there are so many words that you would have no idea the correct pronunciation until you've heard a native speaker say it. Even that's no guarantee it will be correct though!

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#192

Post by brainwad »

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]

Your examples are more or less regular though. English is a stress-based language, so it's expected that pronunciation might change when you add an extra syllable, if the stress moves (syllable -> syllabic is another example, btw).

> wind, rewind

This one is trivial, no? the "wind" in "rewind" is pronounced the same, with /aj/. The "wind" with /ɪ/ is unrelated.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#193

Post by whstl »

richrichardsson wrote: post #191

> This is why English has combinations like sh, th, ee, oo, ou that each make only a single sound. Struggling with the th and ou here as only making a single sound. Through and rough, both not the same ou as sound. That and Thames, but this might be becaues Thames is proper noun? The only thing I like about Croatian is that there is none of this nonsense. If you understand the letters and how to pronounce them, you c…

Correct. It's "one sound" represented by two letters, but not always the same sound in different words.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#194

Post by bookofjoe »

eesmith wrote: post #113
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…

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…

See also: Jamaican Patois aka speakyspoke

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

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#195

Post by petesergeant »

As a (sort of) Englishman, it's a strange feeling reading about the Normans (or Vikings!) as "they", when in fact it's now "us":

> Then the smile vanishes. There are no more English queens or kings. Only Normans.

Fun fact: due to pedigree collapse, if you have white British ancestors, you most likely have a direct linear connection to every Viking, Norman, and peasant who still has living descendents today. William the Conqueror is your great(great, etc) grandfather, as is Cnut the Great, Kenneth MacAlpin, and Rhodri the Great, etc etc.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#196

Post by jen729w »

paul_h wrote: post #133
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…

England has small accent shifts every 25 mins (the other audible accent / http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7843058.stm ) - the situation you describe is two communication orders more complicated than that!

Closer than that in some places. I'm from Sunderland, which is contiguous with Gateshead, and then Newcastle. I can clearly hear when someone is from Sunderland vs. Newcastle, although 'a foreigner' - say, someone from London - might not be able to pick it.

I dare say Liverpudlians and Mancunians and Glaswegians and so on would make the same claim.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#197

Post by kergonath »

mk_stjames wrote: post #23
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.

Another way of saying this is that spoken English has a lot of inbuilt, inherent error correct-ability, ala a very large minimum Hamming distance between spoken words/phrases. I always found French to be very much the opposite in spoken form, due to the 'consonnes finales muettes' and liaison and élision, along with the large amount of homonyms and general colloquialism used in everyday speech. Yet in written form, i…

> I always found French to be very much the opposite in spoken form, due to the 'consonnes finales muettes' and liaison and élision, along with the large amount of homonyms and general colloquialism used in everyday speech.

It is not that different from English in that respect. I found both to be quite difficult compared to e.g. German, which is very regular, or Spanish (which is annoying grammar-wise but straightforward to pronounce).

Spoken English is full of elisions and silent letters, and also full of locale-dependent colloquialisms that take some time getting used to. I remember struggling for a while living in New York and London despite having a decent level in “standard” English. I still occasionally struggle with my mates from Ireland and Yorkshire. After living more than a decade in English-speaking countries I accepted that I will never be able to pronounce correctly a word I never heard before.

Missing liaisons is not problematic when you speak French. It marks you as a non-native but it does not make you harder to understand. They can be often omitted by natives as well, depending on the accent.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#198

Post by kergonath »

dijit wrote: post #11
boredatoms wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is currently popular because money is always popular

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…

> If English wasn't as easy to learn as it is, it would have been destroyed though.

I really dislike this argument. It treats English as a mythical, exceptional language even though it really is not.

English was not particularly hard or easy compared to other European languages. It did not have a particularly hard or easy structure, and orthography took centuries to normalise in continental languages as well. It had the quirk of combining Germanic grammar with Romance vocabulary, but that’s relevant for linguists, not most speakers.

What happened is that it was simplified and adapted over the course of centuries.

French was not displaced by English because of some magical language qualities. The French were displaced by the British somewhat, but mostly by the Americans and language followed.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#199

Post by UncleSlacky »

MLR wrote: post #111
o11c wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The adjective "learnèd" (meaning "well-educated") is a native English word that should take the grave accent even outside of poetry. Also "unlearnèd".

Winged and legged are still pronounced like that too, at least by some. Interestingly, as an addition to the parent comment, there's a certain point in time where a lot of -ed words are often spelt -'d, which presumably is from the transitionary period between the expectation that the -ed was pronounced and today's general pronunciation.

You see this in Shakespeare's plays, "-ed" endings are the equivalent of "-èd", whereas "-'d" is pronounced "-ed" as is common today.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#200

Post by ragazzina »

jcranmer wrote: post #90
efilife wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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…

This article feels to me as it was written in bad faith, trying and failing to prove a point, but then positing the point was proved.

The author happily start the article by submitting:

>The purpose of this page is to describe [...] the rules that tell you how to pronounce a written word correctly over 85% of the time.

but then they quietly show that with their whole page of rules, the reader will not actually pronounce 85% of the words correctly as they just claimed, but actually less than 60%. By arbitrarily deciding that a number of errors can be considered small, the author bumps the number of "correctly pronounced words" to 85%.

Are we talking about 85% of the whole language? No, just 5000 words. Even if they are the most frequent in the written language, they would still only account for around 95% of all the words.

The author position is:

- people complain about the English spelling all the time, saying it's horrible

- the English spelling is actually pretty systematic and this page will explain the rules to understand it

- when you will have mastered these rules, you will pronounce half of the words perfectly - for extremely common words such as "give", "get", "real", "very", "put", "half" you are still SOL

- the english spelling is not so horrible after all: as a perfect student you will only butcher more than 1 word every 10 spoken

To me, the author has proved the point he was trying to disprove.

(and in which rule do /ˈsɪŋɚ/ and /ˈfɪŋɡəɹ/ end up?)

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