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Why English doesn't use accents

deadlanguagesociety.com

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#221

Post by adonovan »

yieldcrv wrote: post #210
lompad wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany is similar. Especially in more rural areas, a couple villages away people are going to have a hard time understanding you. Though there's typically a common dialect variant everybody speaks, usually the one spoken by the largest city in the region. E.g. every middle-franconian understands Nuremberg franconian dialect and is able to talk in a way they would understand.

I'm American My ear has just gotten to the point of noticing German dialects, and spotting the quizzical looks of other German/Austrian/Swiss people in the group Fascinating. I feel like they had 1,000 years to resolve this

1000? Prussia dissolved only in 1947 and the nation state of Germany was reunified only in 1990.

In any case, communication technology (trains, TVs) is a greater determinant of dialect than government.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#222

Post by zajio1am »

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…

> Stop romanticizing about french: it probably has more exceptions and weirdness than english.

As a non-native to both French and English who was taught both languages at school, there is a difference that french pronunciation rules were taught from the beginning, while english pronunciation was taught just as IPA transcription of dictionary words.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#223

Post by gwd »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #204
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…

> 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. There aren't. > I think there are other romanizations where the 'q' sound is represented "tch". Well, maybe; there are a large number of romanizations of Mandarin. But there are no significant romanizations where that is true. It's q in pinyin, ch' in Wade-Giles, and…

> qu and chou are aspirated; ju and zhou aren't. ...Compare [ref]

So the idea here is that chou and zhou are related in a similar way that the t's in "top" and "stop" are related: your mouth and vocal cords are doing the same thing, but in one case you have the puff of air and the other you don't.

At any rate, going back to the original question: the logic behind the choice is still consistent. On this classification, in Mandarin, p and t and ch are aspirated, and in English p and t and ch are voiceless; b and d and j and zh are unaspirated, and in English b and d and j and z are voiced. (And q is mainly thrown in to fill the gap, but its pronunciation in English is voiceless as well.)

Or, to explicitly quote from the ref you shared:

> Such pairs [of aspirated and unaspirated plosives and fricatives] are represented in the pinyin system mostly using letters which in Romance languages generally denote voiceless/voiced pairs (for example [p] and [b]).

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#224

Post by wanderingstan »

kps wrote: post #28
bawolff wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you go early enough, my understanding is that people would write accents in ascii by doing: e ' Which was called "overstriking".

Yes, this was explicitly called out in the ASCII standard, and is the reason ASCII has ~ (in place of the proposed ‾) and ‘^’ (which replaced the ‘↑’ in the original 1963 version).

Interesting! The z80 card in my family’s Apple 2 would render “^” as “↑” and I always wondered the connection. I guess they were using the original spec.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#225

Post by beeforpork »

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

Like others, I don't find that nonsense word particularly enlightening.

But maybe compare '-ough' in: cough, tough, dough, through, plough.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#226

Post by cadamsdotcom »

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.

Fascinating. I had wrote that off as a bug in their CMS.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#227

Post by d-us-vb »

jjav wrote: post #166
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…

> That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules Not really. There's no way to guess how many english words are pronounced based on the written form, unless you've heard it before. And of course the pronunciation may vary wildly based on region/country as well. The most telling evidence of this is the existence of Spelling Bee competitions in english language countries.…

I disagree. For whatever reason, most proficient readers I know have an intuition about the correct pronunciation of a word even if they’ve never heard it spoken before. And even if they use an intuitive pronunciation that isn’t identical to standard pronunciation, they’ll still be understood.

Spelling bee is the opposite direction, going from pronunciation to spelling; not a fair comparison.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#228

Post by fakedang »

lompad wrote: post #168
Luker88 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Germany is similar. Especially in more rural areas, a couple villages away people are going to have a hard time understanding you. Though there's typically a common dialect variant everybody speaks, usually the one spoken by the largest city in the region. E.g. every middle-franconian understands Nuremberg franconian dialect and is able to talk in a way they would understand.

Heck, Swiss German is like this lol.

My cofounder's wife, during a parents together at school, was "advised" by some of the mothers to not "hang around those" mothers because they're stranger folk. Turns out, they lived 1.5 miles away in the next village.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#229

Post by eesmith »

california-og wrote: post #215
eesmith wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your link says ſ (the long s) didn't disappear (from English) until several hundred years after the movable type printing press and makes no mention of physical problems when using that letter, suggesting instead removal gave a type a more modern feel:

> Pioneer of type design John Bell (1746–1831), who started the British Letter Foundry in 1788, is often "credited with the demise of the long s".[12] Paul W. Nash concluded that the change mostly happened very fast in 1800, and believes that this was triggered by the Seditious Societies Act. To discourage subversive publications, this required printing to name the identity of the printer, and so in Nash's view gave printers an incentive to make their work look more modern.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#230

Post by akst »

mousethatroared wrote: post #55
degun wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The explanation you gave is already contained in the cited Wikipedia article. I think this "ghoti" example is more of a tongue-in-cheek mocking of pronunciation inconsistencies. If you want a jarring example, consider laughter and slaughter . I know, i know, they have different origins, but still, it confuses foreigners like me while learning the language.

But English orthography isn't meant to serve foreigners. Im ESL, I struggled with English spelling as much as the next latin speaker who's already learned to read and write in foreigner. But now that I get the reason behind it, I love it. I consider English orthography worthy of UNESCO protection, even. In fact, I am annoyed at the regular spelling of my two latin languages that have left so much history behind.

English Orthography doesn't exactly serve native speakers either.
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