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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#301

Post by jawilson2 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #276
taeric wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has become a thing where folks are taught, basically, that English is not a phonetic language. It is truly mind boggling the number of college educated folks I've talked with that start to try and argue that we don't have a phonetic alphabet. And, like, I get it. We don't have a fully regular one. But this is like the people that think we don't have a single word to describe some things, when they have to basicall…

At least one really obvious way to know that English is a phonetic language: fantasy authors create all sorts of made up names in their books. Sure, sometimes there are disagreements over how to pronounce these names, but generally readers come up with quite similar pronunciations.

"It's pronounced Jandalf!"

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#302

Post by LurkandComment »

You're trying to create set of rules for something that's evolved from strong oral to written to emphasis on oral again. It's organic and used in coordination with many other countries and their languages. If you understood that many of our rules are defined within specific instances, by specific needs (publishers example), and are somewhat arbitrary, you'd be amazed we have any consensus at all. My theory is that publishers, broadcasters (Like the BBC) and educational institutions are really where standardization has been enforced. Outside of that English and language is as flexible as a sender and receiver of a communication will allow.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#303

Post by r00f »

I strongly disagree that "it's a shame" that English does not use diacritics. English is my second language (third maybe, considering that the country of my birth is bilingual), and is my favorite language to read and to write. I tried to learn French for two years and stopped, and all those excessive writing marks were among the reasons.

God bless all those monks who decided to keep English writing clean.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#305

Post by nwatson »

daeken wrote: post #245
MarceColl wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

(B2-ish Spanish learner here but) "ll" is pronounced in at least three variants that I know of: "y", "j", and something between "sh" and "ch". E.g. "llama" might be pronounced like (in English writing) "yama", "zhama", or "shama". The last one really threw me for a while; it's super common in Argentina at least.

I spent time in the "Rio de la Plata" area in the late 1970s, mainly Montevideo, and learned rioplatense Spanish, and would use the ZH sound as in "meaSure" for Y/LL letters in "playa" and "calle".

In the last 40 years I've spent mostly in the USA I rarely have heard Uruguayan/Argentinian Spanish in person or in media, but was surprised to hear Messi and others in recent interviews use SH as in "puSH" for the Y/LL, this apparent has been a generational shift in that area, first in Argentina and then Uruguay. I'd sound old-fashioned if I were to go back to Montevideo these days.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#306

Post by taeric »

pif wrote: post #282
taeric wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has become a thing where folks are taught, basically, that English is not a phonetic language. It is truly mind boggling the number of college educated folks I've talked with that start to try and argue that we don't have a phonetic alphabet. And, like, I get it. We don't have a fully regular one. But this is like the people that think we don't have a single word to describe some things, when they have to basicall…

> English is not a phonetic language. Whoever says that English is a phonetic language does not know what a phonetic language is. The property that characterizes a phonetic language is that you can properly pronounce a written word that you know nothing about.

Counter point, anyone that claims English isn't a phonetic language doesn't know what a logographic writing system is. Or what a gesture language is.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#307

Post by felipellrocha »

r00f wrote: post #303

I strongly disagree that "it's a shame" that English does not use diacritics. English is my second language (third maybe, considering that the country of my birth is bilingual), and is my favorite language to read and to write. I tried to learn French for two years and stopped, and all those excessive writing marks were among the reasons. God bless all those monks who decided to keep English writing clean.

English is your favorite language to read and write? Said no one ever…

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#308

Post by dmurray »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #283
dadoum wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to this paper [0] and my own experience, it's way easier to pronounce a word in French given the spelled word than in English. It's slightly harder to spell French than English for the model of the study, but it's really close. Now, in my personal experience, I feel like French has a lot of rules while English has a lot of outliers which do not follow any rules. But my native language is French, so I am obv…

Yeah as far as I know, in French words are always pronounced consistent with how they're spelled. The same is not true in English. Americans complain a lot about french spellings '-ioux', 'eau', etc. but they offer no gripe over the difference between '-ough' in 'enough' vs 'through'. French is funny to me because the written language and the spoken language are in some ways quite different, with written french intro…

> Yeah as far as I know, in French words are always pronounced consistent with how they're spelled.

It's far from as bad as English, but here's a Reddit thread with lots of French words which are not spelt as they are written. Not esoteric words either; along the lines of hier and monsieur

https://www.reddit.com/r/French/comments/1269a2x/is_there_a_...

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#309

Post by catlover76 »

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?!

[dead]

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#310

Post by bluGill »

pif wrote: post #282
taeric wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has become a thing where folks are taught, basically, that English is not a phonetic language. It is truly mind boggling the number of college educated folks I've talked with that start to try and argue that we don't have a phonetic alphabet. And, like, I get it. We don't have a fully regular one. But this is like the people that think we don't have a single word to describe some things, when they have to basicall…

> English is not a phonetic language. Whoever says that English is a phonetic language does not know what a phonetic language is. The property that characterizes a phonetic language is that you can properly pronounce a written word that you know nothing about.

English is more phonetic than not. There are a lot of words where it isn't clear what is the correct pronunciation, but if you put a random sequence of letters together there are only a few possible pronunciations, often exactly one.

I wish English was more phonetic. Spelling and pronunciations is a mess. However the language is mostly phonetic.

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