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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#321

Post by thechao »

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.

I think you're trying to to argue something like: "the set of dialects that make up English have a large(r?) set of allowable IPA orthographic representations than the accepted set of English orthographies" or something to that effect? And, that, perhaps, Spanish (French? Ukrainian?) have a much smaller set of alternate IPA orthographies for a given acceptable orthography?

I guess I'm really confused. It's not like English is some Arabic language where the orthography is in a second nearly unintelligible languages? Or, Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphs... ?

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#322

Post by Wowfunhappy »

dtech wrote: post #294
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.

I'd argue that is mostly because 1) people follow audiobook or TV series pronunciations and 2) most discussions happen online and not in verbal form. This is definitely a problem when it surfaces. For example the Stormlight Archive [1] series has two voice actors narrating the audiobook, and they don't even agree between them how to pronounce half the made up names. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stormlight_Ar…

As someone who has listened to The Stormlight Archive (and The Wheel of Time with the same two narrators), the differences are absolutely there, but they're relatively small.

Fantasy novels predate the widespread popularity of audiobooks. It used to be quite expensive to distribute a large enough volume of audio. The old "books on tape" cost a lot of money, were frequently abridged, and only existed for the most popular titles.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#323

Post by BitwiseFool »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #135
asielen wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the fun thing about English. There isn't really a single right way to speak or write it. It is defined by common usage. As long as your audience understands you, it is correct. As someone else pointed out, loan words often have accents. At what point does jalapeño become en english word? There is no other english word to refer to the pepper, therefore it is now an english word and therefore english words can…

> That is the fun thing about English. There isn't really a single right way to speak or write it. It is defined by common usage. As long as your audience understands you, it is correct. That's how all languages work - to the chagrin of l'Académie Française - English is no special exception.

I like to believe that, by definition, the only person who speaks English properly is the King of England. Everyone else has an accent.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#324

Post by williamdclt »

mamonoleechi wrote: post #314
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 ori…

> 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.

“Master” would definitely not be correct, but you could write intelligibly enough indeed. It will cause you issues here and there (not being taken seriously, having some miscommunications when the diacritic disambiguates the word…)

If you can’t read the diacritics though, you’ll pronounce words very incorrectly and French is a very unforgiving language for mispronunciation: you will simply not be understood

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#325

Post by eddd-ddde »

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.

Dialects are different since they are still internally consistent.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#326

Post by wizardforhire »

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

Yep! Not only that but people will actively mispronounce words as a form of vetting. Mispronunciations also becoming a form of tribal identity. Speaking of American vs proper English. America is the most diverse cultural landscape in human history. If you stay put, you won’t see it. Start traveling around the country and its the only thing you see.

this is not hyperbole. Sure other places are diverse, however because of the unique nature of the US and its size it just ends up attracting and subsequently absorbing.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#327

Post by lucasoshiro »

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.

> excessive writing marks

In English I need to find how each word is pronounced individually. What the hell is the difference between "men" and "man"? What's the difference between "bitch" and "beach"? Why "though" sounds closer to "throw" than "through" or "thought"? Those differences are encoded in a unclear way that there are more exceptions than rules.

Portuguese (my native language) is not perfect in that sense, but at least it has more rules than exceptions. Part of that is because we use the diacritic marks.

Then, I prefer excessive writing marks than excessive unclear special cases

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#328

Post by williamdclt »

johnnyjeans wrote: post #312
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…

> The "non-phonetic alphabet" is the biggest non-issue I see people raise a stink about

Myself and many friends who aren’t native have struggled with speaking fluently because of it. Most of us still mispronounce some words (my friend pronounced “draught beer” like the lack of rain, instead of like draft).

Doesn’t mean things should change, but it’s certainly not a “non-issue”

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#329

Post by coffeeling »

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…

Agreed, a far better critique of English spelling:

https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/cha...

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#330

Post by codeflo »

johnnyjeans wrote: post #312
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…

> It has a massive phonemic inventory, with 44 unique items. Compare with Spanish's 24, or German's 25.

I'm not sure where you're getting these numbers from, but German has around 45 phonemes according to all sources I could find, depending on how you count: 17 vowels (including two different schwa sounds), 3 diphthongs, 25 consonants.

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