Why English doesn't use accents • Hacker News Board

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#341

Post by pif » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 3:54 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #310

pif wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There's something you speakers of non-phonetic languages cannot fully grasp, I'm afraid!

We Italians, when we were children, we were taught to read based on the written letters, and we were able to read any word. It was normal, during primary school, to pronounce a word correctly and then ask the teacher what it meant. This is something you can not do in English.

And the converse was true as well! An Italian child is able to hear the surname of a new acquaintance, or the name of the village they are from, and write it down properly. In Italian, the question "How do you spell it?" does not make any sense! Again, this is something you can not do in English. Nor can you do it in French, because in the past centuries they had ink to spare and as such they started writing down useless letters that they do not pronounce.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#342

Post by taeric » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 3:56 PM UTC

pif wrote: post #338

taeric wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not stating that English is anything like that. Just that it is not phonetic, in the sense that the written form of a word is not sufficient to pronounce it correctly.

That isn't what that means, though. It is not regular, it is phonetic. Indeed, your argument that there is confusion in spelling is because it is phonetic, but not regular. You know the letters in "glasses" correspond to sounding out something. In contrast to something like an emoji, :glasses:, which you don't.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#343

Post by dctoedt » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 3:57 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!"

Reminiscent of a tweet about the death of the inventor of the GIF, who reportedly said it should be pronounced "jif" — the retweeter's comment was, "I guess he's with Jod."

https://twitter.com/andylevy/status/1506748105735159818 (not there anymore; maybe the account holder ditched Twitter)

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#344

Post by darrenf » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 3:58 PM UTC

lucasoshiro wrote: post #327

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,…

Maybe Jazz Emu is onto something: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ69ny57pR0

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#345

Post by Izkata » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 3:58 PM UTC

lucasoshiro wrote: post #327

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,…

Rules exist, but most are never taught and instead only learned through exposure. It's why "ghoti" is a trick - you have to break several rules of English pronunciation to get "fish" out of that.

Here's a page where someone tried to reconstruct as many of those rules as possible: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html - obviously it can't eliminate all exceptions but it does surprisingly well.

Rules 6-8 are relevant to one of your examples, including the explanation afterwards.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#346

Post by lucasoshiro » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 3:59 PM UTC

nemonemo wrote: post #335

lucasoshiro wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

How can writing marks help in this regard? I can imagine a language with both a lot of exceptions and writing marks.

In Portuguese, they indicate that a syllable is stressed and alternate ways to say the vowels. e.g. "país" is stressed in "i" and means "country", while "pais" is stressed in "a" and means "parents". Tilde (~) indicates that the vowel is nasal, e.g. the "ã" in "São Paulo" means that it sounds like the "u" in "sun"; the default sound of "a" in Portuguese is the same as in "car".

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#347

Post by Xunjin » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 3:59 PM UTC

A point that is always good to think about, a population defines its language and a language defines its population, it's a symbiotic relationship. The language you speak, will shape how you perceive/interact/understand the world itself.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#348

Post by pif » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 4:02 PM UTC

taeric wrote: post #342

pif wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not stating that English is anything like that. Just that it is not phonetic, in the sense that the written form of a word is not sufficient to pronounce it correctly.

That isn't what that means, though. It is not regular, it is phonetic. Indeed, your argument that there is confusion in spelling is because it is phonetic, but not regular. You know the letters in "glasses" correspond to sounding out something. In contrast to something like an emoji, :glasses:, which you don't.

I have to agree with you. With respect to emojis, English is phonetic. But this statement is as stretched as considering a diesel guzzling truck green because the fuel it burns was indeed created using solar energy.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#349

Post by tetraca » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 4:03 PM UTC

felipellrocha wrote: post #307

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…

I don't see why it couldn't be. It has a pretty large corpus of decent literature/poetry/other media/etc, and the worst people seem to complain about is its inconsistent spelling rules that even native speakers struggle with. In general I'd rather deal with spell check failing on some common homophone from time to time than say, having to memorize arbitrary genders for inanimate nouns that lack any consistent marker and then tables of grammatical cases to apply on them based on those genders. Or having to shove a verb to the end of a complicated sentence and having to unroll the whole thing to figure out what's being said (not to pick on any particular language(s) I've learned).

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#350

Post by pif » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 4:04 PM UTC

taeric wrote: post #342

pif wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not stating that English is anything like that. Just that it is not phonetic, in the sense that the written form of a word is not sufficient to pronounce it correctly.

That isn't what that means, though. It is not regular, it is phonetic. Indeed, your argument that there is confusion in spelling is because it is phonetic, but not regular. You know the letters in "glasses" correspond to sounding out something. In contrast to something like an emoji, :glasses:, which you don't.

> but not regular.

There is "not being regular" and there is "not even trying, and getting it right by a stroke of luck from time to time".