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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#411

Post by pests »

ViscountPenguin wrote: post #397
athenot wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is the pragmatic answer. Apple's HyperCard had a French dialect, and AppleScript followed with one too. It was short-lived but did provide a window as to how these programming languages might have looked like had they originated in a non-English world. A fun factoid I just discovered: on March 11, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signs an executive order mandating that ASCII be adopted as a federal informa…

Do you have a source for the executive order claim? I can't find it on this list of executive orders signed by Lydon Johnson, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_executive_actions_by... . And as far as I can tell the claim originates on ascii-code.com and spread from there? Googling executive order 11110 gives no primary information. Edit: found it https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/memorandum-approvi... I…

From a quick search it seems this was a Presidential Memorandum not an Executive Action.

“Executive orders are generally more formal, require publication in the Federal Register, and must cite the President's legal authority, while memoranda are less formal, may not be published, and do not always require a justification of authority.”

These sometimes get called executive orders, like some memos that trump has signed in the last few months were called executive orders by the news and online.

They are essentially the same though. Memos carry legal weight and can direct agencies to carry out specific actions.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#412

Post by sotix »

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.

You can always tell someone who is well read in English when they mispronounce everything they say.

Greek is so much easier than English to pronounce words correctly.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#413

Post by trealira »

rrgok wrote: post #404
tetraca wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh thank god, someone said it. Who cares if "tree" is masculine or feminine, it does not give my any information. In Italian, tree is a masculine word: what can I do knowing "tree" is masculine?

Grammatical gender can serve as disambiguation. I just heard this sentence recently while watching something in Spanish:

"No me compares con alguien como tú, que llegaste aquí de una isla oriental sólo porque te impresionó un espectáculo de magia barato."

In the phrase "un espectáculo de magia barato," which means "cheap magic show" here, you can tell from the genders of the nouns and adjectives that it's that "barato" modifies "espectáculo," meaning that the show is cheap and it's not that the magic is cheap.

It's not that useful here, because it's not hard to figure out the correct meaning from the context anyway, but it's a tool that helps clarity regardless. And when you learn a language well enough, it's not like you're thinking about this super consciously, you just know the word and gendering it and its adjectives flows right off your tongue. I think this is probably easier for a non-native to learn than all the irregular spellings of English, but I wouldn't know, being a native English speaker.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#414

Post by dragonwriter »

taeric wrote: post #400
dragonwriter wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Phonetic is absolutely a feature linked to spoken languages, though? It's a feature linked to spoken languages, since it is a feature of the relation of non-spoken (usually written) language to a spoken language. But it is not a feature of a spoken language. > Sign language, for example, is not phonetic, as many users of it cannot speak or hear. Yes, in causal terms, the fact many users of sign languages aren't fam…

It absolutely is a feature of spoken languages. It is in contrast to vocalizations, specifically because it is about speech and not just the sounds animals can make. I get what you are aiming at, but phonetics is about speech. Is why you can reliably say how many phonemes different languages have. If you had to cover all vocalizations that people could do, you would have a bit more trouble.

"phonetics" is about speech, but the noun "phonetics" is not the adjective "phonetic" as applied to a language. "phonetic" is not a modifier that applies to spoken language (with the hypothetical caveat I gave upthread), and even if it was, it would have a different definition than the one that applies to non-spoken language and is about the relation such a language has to a spoken language, so trying to redirect to it in a discussion of that use of the adjective "phonetic" would be equivocation, argumentative conflation of different definitions of the same word.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#415

Post by crabbone »

alephnerd wrote: post #382
csomar wrote: post #340

I sometimes wonder if English dominated programming and the Internet partly because it doesn't use accents or special characters. You have limited space on a keyboard, and as a native Arabic/French speaker, typing in those languages is a real hassle. French requires é, à, ç and other accents, while Arabic is even more complex with right-to-left text and changing letter forms. English just flows naturally. Maybe the I…

A much more simpler answer is the fact that much of the tech and ecosystem for computers was developed and commercialized in the US. If Silicon Valley was in France, we'd all be using AZERTY and Minitel.

Well, there's this story about how printing failed Arabic. Allegedly, in Italy, they tried to print a Koran, but because the printers didn't speak Arabic, and were trained on Latin scripts, they messed it up so much that the Arab world came to believe printing is not going to work for them. Even though most scientific books of the day were written in Arabic and the best schools spoke the language, it quickly fell out of favor, being replaced by Latin in Europe.

In turn, the Caliphate made a point of standardizing the script and creating libraries which fueled research science for a good few centuries.

----

Even before Internet, languages with diacritics (eg. Russian Ё) were deprecating their use. I believe something similar is happening in German (with ß). Also, languages with long history seen incremental thinning out of the alphabet to remove duplication and rare special cases. Sometimes, the opposite happened, but it was usually brought by reactionary politics, especially inspired by local nationalism which looked for validation in ancient history. So, for example, in the 90s Ukrainians brought back the letter Ґ that was used in only a handful of words, and was happily forgotten during the Soviet times.

So, convenience and suitability for new technology can be a meaningful factor in adoption.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#416

Post by 98codes »

Izkata wrote: post #345
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,…

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 o…

I couldn't help to look and see if the company behind commercials that are burned into my brain from 40 years ago are still a thing, and lo, Hooked on Phonics is still going strong!

This page[1] walks through the basics of phonemic awareness that children need to learn via exposure & repetition in order to learn to apply that aural learning to reading.

It makes me wonder if a program like this, aimed at English-speaking children, might help those adults learning to speak & read English if they could put up with being addressed as if they were a child.

[1] https://www.hookedonphonics.com/reading/phonemic-awareness/

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#417

Post by graypegg »

csomar wrote: post #340

I sometimes wonder if English dominated programming and the Internet partly because it doesn't use accents or special characters. You have limited space on a keyboard, and as a native Arabic/French speaker, typing in those languages is a real hassle. French requires é, à, ç and other accents, while Arabic is even more complex with right-to-left text and changing letter forms. English just flows naturally. Maybe the I…

Tangential: Ùù has always seemed immensely silly to me. It’s given an entire key on the CSA keyboard despite only being officially used in 1 non-proper-noun word: où. It’s there solely to disambiguate with ou, the actual phonetics are not affected. Whenever I look down at my MacBook’s keyboard I think it seems a bit out of place haha

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#418

Post by [deleted] »

demetrius wrote: post #151
PyWoody wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you go back even further, you get the iota subscript [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iota_subscript

Iota subscript is a 12-century invention. Rough and smooth breathings (ἁ for ha, ἀ for a) are much older Greek diacritics. For another example of classical diacritics, see apices in Latin (á for long a).

[deleted]

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#419

Post by kergonath »

cvoss wrote: post #372
kergonath wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I always found French to be very much the opposite in spoken form, due to the 'consonnes finales muettes' and liaison and élision, along with the large amount of homonyms and general colloquialism used in everyday speech. It is not that different from English in that respect. I found both to be quite difficult compared to e.g. German, which is very regular, or Spanish (which is annoying grammar-wise but straightfor…

> I will never be able to pronounce correctly a word I never heard before. This happens not infrequently to native English speakers. It's especially prominent for people who read a lot when they're young and develop a large vocabulary that doesn't get socialized until much later. My English teacher, of all people, was notorious for this. Real life examples from native speakers: Emphasizing the wrong syllable in "fora…

This is my experience as well. I would just add

> Emphasizing the wrong syllable

As a native French speaker, I will never be able to emphasise the right syllable in any language, ever :D

Stress is just not really a thing in French, and it is quite difficult to get it intuitively later in life.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#420

Post by MangoToupe »

csomar wrote: post #340

I sometimes wonder if English dominated programming and the Internet partly because it doesn't use accents or special characters. You have limited space on a keyboard, and as a native Arabic/French speaker, typing in those languages is a real hassle. French requires é, à, ç and other accents, while Arabic is even more complex with right-to-left text and changing letter forms. English just flows naturally. Maybe the I…

Maybe that makes sense for french vs english, but there are plenty of languages that avoid accents in transcription (despite being just as tonal or more so than english) because they don't have the analytic diction required to discuss the abstract concepts all over programming, computer science, and even just "business".
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