Why English doesn't use accents • Hacker News Board

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#311

Post by School-Cotton » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 2:58 PM UTC

germandiago wrote: post #285

School-Cotton wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since less than 10% of Spanish speakers are from Spain, there’s no reason to assume you were specifically talking about that one country when referring to the Spanish language in general. And anyway, as you point out, even in Spain the form México is accepted now.

I thought it is perfectly reasonable to talk about spanish from Spsin the same you talk about English from England. After all, it is where they come from originally and have their own spelling (colour vs color, etc.) An x in standard spanish has always been the two sounds I told you and that mexican deviation is specific to Mexico. Yes, it is over 100 million speakers but I was still assuming the root language in its…

I get your point, but FWIW, México is not a Mexican deviation; it's just an older Spanish spelling. E.g. Jiménez was once spelled Ximénez and there are probably lots of other examples.

The "root language spoken in its original place" absolutely did pronounce X like modern J.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#312

Post by johnnyjeans » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 3:01 PM UTC

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.

2nding this. The "non-phonetic alphabet" is the biggest non-issue I see people raise a stink about. It really doesn't matter, context is the heavy-weight backbone of language.

On top of that, I think people really underestimate how inappropriate diacritics would be for English. It has a massive phonemic inventory, with 44 unique items. Compare with Spanish's 24. English's "phonetic" writing system would have to be as complex as a romanized tonal language like Mandarin (which has to account for 46 unique glyphs once you account for 4 tones over 6 vowels + the 22 consonants). Or you know, the absolute mess that is romanization of Afro-Asiatic languages. El 3arabizi daiman byi5ali el siza yid7ako, el Latin bas nizaam kteebe mish la2e2 3a lugha hal2ad m3a2ade.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#313

Post by bluGill » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 3:02 PM UTC

devilbunny wrote: post #259

akst wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is trivia that is useless in almost all contexts. I've been a native English speaker all my life and this is the first I've heard of that. I can't think of any situation in life where knowing that fact would have been helpful. Your claim seems reasonable, but if someone says you are wrong I wouldn't fact check it even if clear links were posted so that I could.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#314

Post by mamonoleechi » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 3:04 PM UTC

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.

Accents in french are pretty irrelevant, you can totally ignore them and master the language. Most french people ignore them while chatting/mailing/texting online.

If you ignore accents, some words can be mistaken for other words (with different accents), but if you check the context, the problem quickly go away.

Accents are just useful to help you pronounce correctly words ; they are also a hint about the word's origin (ex: ^ means the words is greek) ; I don't get why it stopped you from learning the language.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#315

Post by koverstreet » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 3:04 PM UTC

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.

Spanish is a bit tidier with them then French, though

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#316

Post by bluGill » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 3:07 PM UTC

jgwil2 wrote: post #248

hyperpape wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But English orthography isn't meant to serve foreigners. Or natives. It is slower for children to learn to read English than other languages.

Teaching my toddler to read now and I definitely feel like if we spoke Spanish my work would be done already.

Probably not. Toddlers generally don't have the brain to learn any reading. Spanish's advantages in reading isn't how young you can start learning to read, it is how fast you can stop reading. Spanish schools stop teaching reading takes about 5 years to learn, English 6, and Japanese 9 - after that much training kids are finally considered to read anything. (sometimes we talk about college level reading, but that is more about mastery of topic specific topic - Doctors, lawyers, and engineers each have special vocabulary that needs extra training to read, but they cannot read each other's technical papers)

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#317

Post by bee_rider » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 3:10 PM UTC

jawilson2 wrote: post #301

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

I don’t think he could be taken seriously with a name like Yandalf.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#318

Post by gwd » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 3:11 PM UTC

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.

I think that must have been within one dialect. If you include all dialects of English (Scottish, Irish, Australian, Singaporian, Indian, American, etc. etc.) I'm sure you have a lot more than 43 phonemes.

In any case, her point wasn't to give a lecture on linguistics, but to impress upon the parents how complicated English really is to learn to read.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#319

Post by stockresearcher » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 3:12 PM UTC

germandiago wrote: post #292

lelandfe wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think castle is bad, wait till you hear forecastle (“fok-sul”)

Hahaha. I was not aware of that one. Yes, looks like undecipherable.

A lot of nautical terms have unusual pronunciations. English sailors primarily came from coastal regions, and were very happy to have a lingo that was incomprehensible to the landsman. All of this carried over to North America as well.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#320

Post by huhkerrf » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 3:13 PM UTC

kome wrote: post #141

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…

you clearly haven't read the article... they are talking about diacritics (accents) and not inflection of the spoken language. i find absolutely worrisome that nobody is reading the articles anymore, and they just read the title. it makes the quality of the discussion very very low.

From the site guidelines:

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that"

Personally, the parent comment added a lot more, even inadvertantly, than one complaining about whether someone has or has not read the article.