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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#551

Post by sroussey »

justahuman74 wrote: post #531
cpursley wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s that have to do with how terrible the English writing system is? Why not just reform written English to read the same way it’s sounds? I’m maybe a B2 level Russian learner and can near perfectly pronounce almost any modern Russian writing because it’s written almost exactly the way it’s spoken. I assume it’s the same with many other languages.

Go to England and try to get even two small towns to agree on what the sounds are

That’s funny!

But really, these days we have Hollywood and it sorta decides what English sounds like. Even if it sounds different in your town in the USA.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#552

Post by Gormo »

pif wrote: post #377
bcatanzaro wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but Italy had to centralize its language in order to accomplish this. 1000 Italian dialects were suppressed in a very heavyweight process. (And probably some people didn't like speaking Florentine, which became modern Italian.) English is complicated because it's decentralized and there is no authority to regularize it. Which is a feature, not a bug.

You are wrong on several levels. 1 - Being fluent in the national language does not prevent people from maintaining their dialects in parallel. 2 - Whether a language is phonetic has no relation to political issues concerning dialects. 3 - Whether a language is phonetic has no relation to whether people like to use it. 4 - English got decentralized starting with the Age of Sail, but the lack of correspondence between…

> English got decentralized starting with the Age of Sail, but the lack of correspondence between written and oral forms is systemic and older than that.

That's not really true -- there is and was a great deal of dialect diversity within England itself. It was widespread printing that allowed languages to be standardized at the scale of nation-states in the first place: the divergences that developed after the age of sail were reversing convergence that had only begun a couple of hundred years earlier.

And although versions of English from the south and east of England became the basis for modern standard English, other dialects persisted and sometimes spread around the world, so some of the differences between English dialects globally are due to disparate influences from different dialects originating within the British Isles.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#553

Post by jmclnx »

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…

I came here to say the same, I remember the days when some systems only had upper case characters and the character set was limited.

That may have allowed for more control characters they would be allowed in other European Languages.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#554

Post by sotix »

tshaddox wrote: post #532
sotix wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You can always tell someone who is well read in English when they mispronounce everything they say. This is a very popular pro-reading sentiment. The trouble is that you can also read about how to pronounce words.

You can indeed. However, if I knew all of the words I would mispronounce, I would have already looked them up! The trouble with mispronouncing words is that often you’re unaware that you’re doing so.

Respite got me recently.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#555

Post by lucasoshiro »

HorseOfCourse wrote: post #549
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,…

Do men/man and bitch/beach sound the same to you? I am kinda confused here, these words have distinct meanings and sounds.

> Do men/man and bitch/beach sound the same to you?

Not exactly the same, but I differentiate them more based on the context than in the pronunciation.

Giving an example for Portuguese that has about the same difference: "roupa de lá" (clothes from there) and "roupa de lã" (wool clothes). If you write them in Google Translate or similar you'll see the difference, which is very subtle for non-Portuguese speakers but sounds completely different to us.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#556

Post by lucasoshiro »

int_19h wrote: post #456
Izkata wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The complexity of these rules, and the number of exceptions that you need to learn notwithstanding the rules, can be roughly estimated for any given language by training a language model on word IPA correspondence for that language (using a subset of the vocabulary as a training set), and then seeing how well it can predict the remaining words. You can run it in either direction, too, to separately measure the diffic…

Nice!

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#557

Post by Wowfunhappy »

dinfinity wrote: post #368
palmfacehn wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The confusion may come from the various spelling conventions in the numerous loan words. In many of the counterintuitive cases, you could imagine a more phonetic spelling. The tradition has been to preserve buffet as is, instead of rewriting it as, "buffay". The distinction is there. English can be used phonetically. We prefer to preserve the heritage of various loan words instead.

Eh. Only sometimes . Hearing Americans pronounce the French loanword 'niche' as 'nitch' instead of 'neesh' is cringe-inducing. English pronunciation is just kind of a mess (especially in the US). It is one of the few languages where highly educated mature people are regularly unsure of how to pronounce a word in their own language or where there is no agreed upon 'non-dialect'/standard pronunciation.

...we all agree that the right pronunciation of "nitch" is "neesh", though, or at least I've never heard a serious argument to the contrary. People just genuinely don't know how to pronounce it because they've only seen it written.

One that still gets me personally is "hyperbole"--I know how it's pronounced but when I read it, I still say "hyper-bowl" in my head more often than not. I don't think I've ever made the mistake while reading out loud to someone yet, but it will likely happen some day and when it does I will feel very stupid.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#558

Post by cpursley »

justahuman74 wrote: post #531
cpursley wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s that have to do with how terrible the English writing system is? Why not just reform written English to read the same way it’s sounds? I’m maybe a B2 level Russian learner and can near perfectly pronounce almost any modern Russian writing because it’s written almost exactly the way it’s spoken. I assume it’s the same with many other languages.

Go to England and try to get even two small towns to agree on what the sounds are

This does not even account for the bizarre spelling of many (most?) English words. For example, letters that are skipped.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#559

Post by cobbaut »

trealira wrote: post #510
cobbaut wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet it is gif like in gin and giraffe...

And yet there's also girl, gift, gimp, gill, gibbon, and giggle.

But but but the creator himself said it is gif like in gin and giraffe... right?

TIL: gimp is gimp and not gimp? I always pronounced this like gin.

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