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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#251

Post by gus_massa »

pxndxx wrote: post #157
dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it. is there no accent variation in Spanish? Such a 1:1 system would never work in English, because the way words are pronounced can be very different in e.g. Melbourne, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Boston, for example.

Yeah there are multiple accents in Spanish, but each accent is still a 1:1 mapping from written word to pronunciation, there's no enough/through/dough nonsense.

For example for a small car ("auto") you say and write:

In Argentina: "autito"

In Colombia: "autico"

In Spain: "autillo"

the same rule applies for all words, not only for cars.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#252

Post by School-Cotton »

diogolsq wrote: post #144
germandiago wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Portuguese and German are like that. You’ve never seen the word before, but when reading it for the first time, you’ll probably pronounce it correctly. English is awful, but French takes the crown on this one—though more because it has the same pronunciation for many different words and written forms. English, on the other hand, the alphabet doesn’t map well. Mood and flood both have “oo”, yet each is pronounced diff…

French is a lot less bad than English in this regard. In French you can usually (though not always) predict how a word is pronounced from its spelling, but not vice versa. In English, both directions are impossible.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#253

Post by jason-johnson »

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.

well, if you ignore the current country borders then "German" would encompass a large portion of Switzerland and the Netherlands. So, with that assumption, I would be surprised if Italian had more dialects than German.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#254

Post by IAmBroom »

patrick41638265 wrote: post #220
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

'Ennery 'Iggins, is that you?

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#255

Post by pmichaud »

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…

When I was doing a bunch of learning about linguistics, situations like this were very interesting and confusing to me. I still don't have a good working intuition for how this is possible. I don't understand what maintains the sound differences in the face of the continuous exposure to substantially different accents. It's empirically possible, but it's never made sense to me. Why don't you and your brothers end up talking the same after a while?

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#256

Post by IAmBroom »

yawboakye wrote: post #208
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…

it remains true to this day. gascon[0] is still spoken in south of france, by both young and old. i know because i've heard it spoken. the idea that the french speak french, italians italian, is very modern. european nations weren't as properly integrated as modern history will have us believe. iirc the integration sped up post-ww2. cf seeing like a state[1]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gascon_dialect [1]: htt…

I studied Anglo-Norman French (circa 1300s), and found it strikingly useful speaking with a woman who worked in the Breton region of France.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#257

Post by School-Cotton »

germandiago wrote: post #234
decimalenough wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

x is pronounced four different ways in Spanish: like j in México, like the English “sh” in Xcaret, like s in xenofobia and like English “x” in extremo.

The first two are not productive now in normal Spanish words: they are only used in old spellings that have irregularly been retained, and in loanwords from indigenous languages. But they do exist.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#258

Post by goalieca »

jcranmer wrote: post #36
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

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…

English is a particularly challenging language to spell with. How many languages have a national spelling competition?

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#259

Post by devilbunny »

akst wrote: post #230
mousethatroared wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s fairly good at helping us understand the etymology. Have a “y” acting as a vowel in the spelling? Good chance it’s Greek. Have a “k”? Almost certainly not Latin.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#260

Post by jason-johnson »

trchek wrote: post #117
jcranmer wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This often gets trotted out, but it's not really true. English is a solidly Germanic language, which merely happened to lose the core attribute of Indo-European languages (extensive verb inflection), and in more recent centuries, there's been a tendency to adopt Latin and Greek words for new word formation rather than (as German did) using native words. So 'technology' instead of 'craftlearn' or 'television' instead…

Solidly Germanic with an absurd amount of French, down to nearly identical spelling for many common words. I’m not talking about cognates but actually 100% the same spelling and meaning and they’re often not from some recent century but from old French. I’m sure you have a solid basis for saying this but it’s basically impossible to write many sentences without by accident using French down to the original spelling.…

I believe this is because England was conquered by the Normans (french speakers). I think it was within the last 100 years or so that the English aristocracy finally stopped speaking French among themselves.
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