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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#261

Post by 6P58r3MXJSLi »

eesmith wrote: post #114
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

I thought the article did a good job of explaining how English uses additional letters where French use accents, like the "h" in "ship" to indicate how the s is pronounced.

that's how "sh" is pronounced, not how "s" is pronounced

same pronunciation of sh in ship is found in

- sugar

- sure

- machine

- Chicago

- mustache

- sheikh

- nation (!!!!)

Can you notice that some of those words do not have any "s" in them?

English doesn't make any sense.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#262

Post by dadoum »

milliams wrote: post #177
teleforce wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun facts almost one third (1/3) of English language vocabulary are similar to French. To be exact most of the professional and legal version of the English words are taken from French. Hence if you understand English, you can read short notice or announcement in French, and understand them mostly. But if you have people spoken the same notice and announcement in French version to you without you reading it, most pro…

While ~29% of the dictionary words come from French, in any written or spoken sentence the number falls dramatically. All the small joining words we use and the core of our grammar is Germanic. See Rob Word's "Is English really a Germanic language?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCE4C9GvqI0

Fun fact, in your first sentence there is approximately 30% of the words which are not Germanic.

(my separation of the words, which may be slightly off:

While of the words come from, in any written or spoken the falls. All the small words we and the of our is // dictionary French sentence number dramatically joining use core grammar Germanic )

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#263

Post by jgwil2 »

ABS wrote: post #242
eahm wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny also I moved to USA ~20 years ago and you lose the Italian, you don't remember words etc. but you'll never lose your dialect, it just comes natural because that's how you grew up instead of what you learned growing up and from school, Tuscan people have it easier because the language comes from their dialect, Dante etc. And to add, I wouldn't click that link if you paid me lol, I hate the Barese... ok I clicked…

you are making the mistake of confusing your experience, which is of course legit but anecdata, with "how it works" in general. I'm an almost 50 years old Italian so not a spring chicken but I definitely learnt Italian growing up, not a dialect, and not "from school". I guess it's the difference between growing up in a city vs a village.

Well yeah, GP's comment obviously only applies in the case that your native language is not standard Italian.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#264

Post by School-Cotton »

wredcoll wrote: post #77
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…

I want to know who thought that chinese transliterated into "english characters" should use a whole bunch of q, x and zs to represent sounds in a way that no other english word does. Why is Zhou pronounced that way?!

Your first question, who thought of the system, has a straight answer. From Wikipedia:

> Hanyu Pinyin was designed by a group of mostly Chinese linguists, including Wang Li, Lu Zhiwei, Li Jinxi, Luo Changpei, as well as Zhou Youguang (1906–2017), an economist by trade, as part of a Chinese government project in the 1950s.

By the way, they are not “English” characters; they are Latin/Roman characters, and used in a huge number of languages with different spelling conventions. Pinyin was created for the entire world to use, not specifically English speakers.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#265

Post by School-Cotton »

jcranmer wrote: post #85
wredcoll wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to know who thought that chinese transliterated into "english characters" should use a whole bunch of q, x and zs to represent sounds in a way that no other english word does. Why is Zhou pronounced that way?!

A few plausible answers to that: In general, it's not transliteration into English characters, it's transliteration into the Latin alphabet. That means that transliteration tends to be shared across the various European languages that use the Latin alphabet. And given that the English were one of the last powers to actually engage in the naval trade war, they're less likely to be the basis of a major transliteration…

> That means that transliteration tends to be shared across the various European languages that use the Latin alphabet

Not just European languages. Pinyin is useful for everyone that has to interact with Chinese words, whether their first language is English, French, Swahili, or even Mandarin.

A lot of people might not realize that the primary users of Pinyin are Chinese people. The way typing Chinese works is that you type the pronunciation in Pinyin and then a box pops up with choices of characters from which you select the correct one. It's also used in dictionaries to give the pronunciation of unfamiliar characters.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#266

Post by germandiago »

zajio1am wrote: post #236
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.

> 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 individ…

Strictly speaking, spanish has the same sound for v and b, unlike other romance languages. G and j when followed by e or i also.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#267

Post by germandiago »

School-Cotton wrote: post #257
germandiago wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, yes. I was speaking about standard Spanish from Spain.

Xenofobia is an s, yes, and excursión is "ks" In fsct, Méjico is the traditional way to write Mexico in Spanish grom Spain until it was accepted the other form a few years ago. I still write "Méjico" myself.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#268

Post by School-Cotton »

pmichaud wrote: post #255
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…

I mean, people do end up talking the same after a while. Regional differences are disappearing and being leveled all over the world due to the influence of centralized education systems and media.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#269

Post by jghn »

woleium wrote: post #87
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.

as i understand it, english is actually 3-5 other languages in a trench coat.

There's a really good podcast [1] that dives into the background of English. It starts off even further back, talking about PIE and how that affected all the earlier languages of the region. And then starts tying the pieces together on how English was formed.

[1] https://historyofenglishpodcast.com

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#270

Post by foobarian »

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.…

South Slavic languages have 1-1 mappings thanks to an engineer in disguise [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karad%C5%BEi%C4%87#Linguis...

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