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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#231

Post by morganf »

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…

It doesn't compare to that coolness you just shared, but I'm from Long Island (right outside New York City) and I and everyone from my childhood town can differentiate a Long Island accent from a New Jersey accent (very similar but subtly different; a suburb on the other side of NYC) from a Queens accent (a type of NY accent from a NY neighborhood, whose most famous exemplar is The Nanny) from a Brooklyn accent (another type of NY accent, the Mel Brooks sort and how my dad speaks), etc etc. So, while, the US is nothing like Italy where every 3 miles there's a different language-or-dialect, the US accent isn't nearly as uniform as one might think, for even within cities and their suburbs, like my hometown in the above example, there is a comparable dynamic, where going not-that-far (these neighborhoods and suburbs aren't far from each other) people speak in accents that are notably different to locals, although surely people not from NY group it all together as "the NY accent" without differentiating the level-of-nasal-ness and other such contributing factors to the accent.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#232

Post by bloak »

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.

The Economist uses diacritics in French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish words, but deletes the diacritics from other languages (or maybe they keep them when they happen to resemble diacritics from those languages). I think I once saw a letter from a Hungarian complaining about that: a word they'd used meant something silly or obscene after they'd removed the diacritic.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#233

Post by rkomorn »

eesmith wrote: post #211
rkomorn wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sp…

"Over 50 in rural communities" in one of the more sparsely populated areas of France makes for a very small slice of the population even in that area, and even then, as pointed out, French is spoken by everyone.

On top of that, it is more "anyone who speaks limousin is likely over 50, and in a rural community", than "anyone over 50 in rural communities in that area likely speaks Limousin".

There are 10k speakers of Limousin today (according to Wikipedia), out of about 1.2M residents in Dordogne and Limousin combined. That's less than 1% just for that area.

To me, it is more of a local curiosity than a mind-blowing fact, but I suppose I grew up learning about the various dialects in France, so I have a different take.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#234

Post by germandiago »

decimalenough wrote: post #203
gwd wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Spanish is better than English, but it's nowhere near that regular. There are three different ways to pronounce "x", wild dialectal variations in "ll" and "c", etc.

The dialects I can buy it but I think the x has only two ways? It is a very regular language from the point of view of the written mapping to sound.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#235

Post by MarceColl »

decimalenough wrote: post #203
gwd wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Spanish is better than English, but it's nowhere near that regular. There are three different ways to pronounce "x", wild dialectal variations in "ll" and "c", etc.

The rules are very clear on when those are used though, you are not really arguing the original point imo. What are the dialectical variations in "ll" and "c"?

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#236

Post by zajio1am »

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.

> Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it.

IMHO purely phonemic orthography makes orthography unnecessary complex, as there are language features like assimilation[1] that happens naturally in spoken form but does not make sense in written form.

In contrast, morphophonemic orthography keeps systematic and consistent mapping between spoken and written form for individual morphemes, but not necessary for words, as in written form morphemes are just concatenated (to make words), while in spoken form there may be complex interactions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation_(linguistics)

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#237

Post by EbNar »

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…

Italian here... Are you from the south of Italy, by any chance? Because I'm from there and it's exactly how you describe it.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#238

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#239

Post by eythian »

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.…

Dutch, which has a pretty reasonable sound-to-orthography mapping (some exceptions of course, but not all that many) also has spelling bees. Often won by the Belgians.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#240

Post by __s »

lou1306 wrote: post #216
qsort wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Dante is a poor example for language proficiency, as he was educated / traveled/ well read. The common person would have a much different lived experience

I have colleagues in India. It's a diverse mesh of regions that vary in about every way. Was explained people grow up with 3 languages, their regional language, a neighboring region's language, a more general language, & then educated folk are taught English. Then in school they were still taking classes for other romantic languages. At an Indian restaurant with one colleague I noticed they would mostly rely on hand gestures. One factor here is that there may often be a language barrier

I've also interacted a bit with Senegalese, which has Wolof as the primary language, then French taught in schools. Many only know Wolof (with French influence weaved in). & the well educated learn to speak English, & how to maintain more European French accent

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