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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#211

Post by eesmith »

rkomorn wrote: post #173
eesmith wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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",…

FWIW, the book was written in 1972.

I mean "there were some people", not all people - Thomas, in the quote, came from Paris and spoke French. He did not learn a regional language.

I don't mean 'many regions' because the only example I had was one region. The fact that there was at least one region where local French people, in a region which had been part of France seemingly since at least the Middle Ages, did not speak French as their mother tongue, astonished me.

FWIW, the French Wikipedia page says:

> Ainsi Malevil serait partiellement inspiré du site de Commarques (sa grotte, son abri troglodyte et son château)[2], tandis que le village de la Roque serait partiellement inspiré de la Roque Saint-Christophe, forteresse troglodyte voisine du château de Commarque. ...

and the location,

> La vallée des Rhunes : inspirée de la vallée des Beunes, et plus précisément la grande Beune.

so the author's fictional location was supposed to suggest the department of Dordogne in south west France.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limousin_dialect tells me

> Limousin ... is a dialect of the Occitan language, spoken in the three departments of Limousin, parts of Charente and the Dordogne in the southwest of France. ... Limousin is used primarily by people over age 50 in rural communities. All speakers speak French as a first or second language. Due to the French single language policy, it is not recognised by the government and therefore considered endangered by the linguistic community.

Those people over age of 50 would likely have been children in a book written 53 years ago, with Limousin as a much more common language amongst the local adults.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#212

Post by eadmund »

duskwuff wrote: post #16
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.

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.

I’ve always seen it written with an acute accent: ‘curséd.’ Wikipedia notes both usages, but to my knowledge I have never once read a poem which used a grave accent that way.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#213

Post by zorked »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #30
Dwedit wrote: post #4

Diacritics aren't unambiguous, there are different conventions for using them. What sound does "ā" make? It depends.

Many native english speaker here like to fantasize on the superiority of other cultures / languages but what good are diacritics for when there are still a shitload of letters that have no diacritics and can be pronounced in different ways ? For example let's take french... A cat is a "chat" but you don't pronounced the 't'. Oh but in "chatte" (pussycat or pussy), you pronounce the t's. While in other words in french…

The problem with French is that pronounciation changed but not ortography. It's easy to see that you did pronounce chaT in the past. Other languages periodically review their ortography. My language had that twice in my lifetime.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#215

Post by california-og »

eesmith wrote: post #115
mousethatroared wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not wrong, except the technological reason. As I understand it, English lost a lot of characters when the movable type printing press was created.

Only þ (thorn) died with the printing of Caxton's Bible using y-, for cost reasons. The other letters -- ƿ (wynn), æ (ash), and ð (eth) -- went out of use long before movable type printing. https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/the-lost-letters-of-th...

And long s:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s

AFAIK it was dropped out because the top hook of the long s punch broke easily, and could be easily replaced with a basic s.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#216

Post by lou1306 »

qsort wrote: post #122
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.

> Well, that's because they're really languages and not dialects!

Indeed they are not strictly dialects of Italian, which followed its own evolution alongside them. I think most of them could still be explained as dialects of Latin, who underwent major "niche differentiation" in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Rome and the rise of barbaric kingdoms.

> [Italian] was mostly a written/literary language before that.

This is a bit of an exaggeration. Clearly, even before the early modern era "Italians" could understand each other. Dante (from Florence) lived in Genoa and Ravenna, and had no need for an interpreter from what we can gather. Ditto the many "Renaissance men" who toured around Italy (Leonardo: Florence->Milan; Raphael and Michelangelo: Florence->Rome; Galileo:Pisa->Padua). This level of interconnection becomes really hard to explain without a high degree of mutual intelligibility.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#217

Post by gwd »

Kolya wrote: post #205
gwd wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ar…

The article you linked to specifically says there are only voiceless plosives in Mandarin!

And, you'll notice I pointed out English voiced plosives. :-D

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#218

Post by jgalt212 »

Diacritics mostly just add a layer of unnecessary complexity, and make it hard for computers to handle.

Given the above, I'm surprised Esperanto was designed using accent marks. But I suspect those weren't the most practical people.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#219

Post by namenotrequired »

petesergeant wrote: post #195

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 t…

It’s funny, how people identify can diverge a lot from genetic reality. Even e.g. Brazilians, who are mostly descendent of Europeans, will always say “we were colonised”

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#220

Post by patrick41638265 »

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…

Same in some parts of Germany. In the area where I grew up in you can tell in which village a person is from just by the way they talk, and the villages are just ~3 km apart!

From what I know this is because it was a relatively remote, dangerous and poor region (all by the standards of hundred years back) which changed ownership a lot (between clergy, bavaria, prussia) and people were mostly left to themselves

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