French barely has diacritics.
There aren’t that many different diacritics, but every other word has one. Just look at any text in French, it’s full of é, è, ê, and à.
Why English doesn't use accents
181–190 of 615 posts
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the internet the most marked issue is the difference between British English spellings (England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and the USA. It is frustrating that on most spell checked text boxes words like: harbour, labour, actualise, etc shown as misspelt. I find it most irksome that the Australian Labor Party has chosen the USA spelling in spite of being part of the Commonwealth.
After enough programming over the years, I feel like my mind has separated the concept of a colour (which I learned as a child) and `Color` data.
For me (Brit), ‘program’ is some software and ‘programme’ is a collection of projects, in the project management sense
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules Not really. There's no way to guess how many english words are pronounced based on the written form, unless you've heard it before. And of course the pronunciation may vary wildly based on region/country as well. The most telling evidence of this is the existence of Spelling Bee competitions in english language countries.…
> But, french is much worse!
Nah. Having learned both, French is easier in this regard. It is not as random, it has rules they work most of the time.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the internet the most marked issue is the difference between British English spellings (England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and the USA. It is frustrating that on most spell checked text boxes words like: harbour, labour, actualise, etc shown as misspelt. I find it most irksome that the Australian Labor Party has chosen the USA spelling in spite of being part of the Commonwealth.
Did you mean misspelled
> As a result of these circumstances, things like spelling practices varied from one place to another, and one scribe to another. The same word could even be written on the same page in multiple ways.
I believe we can all still be confident scribes and maybe even have our own preferred way of writing words, where we within reason push the boundaries or push our own viewpoints through self expression :D
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, not really. "engage", "engorge", "engrave", "engross", "engulf" are all fairly common words that are either often or exclusively pronounced that way (some dictionaries might show /in-g/, but /n/ is really /ŋ/ before g or k, even if they remain). Since these can take prefixes, this also proves we're not limited to being at the start of a word. Searching for words that can be spelled with with "ing" or "eng" finds…
You might be right, but for what it’s worth I’ve literally never heard any of those words pronounced that way. I’ve only ever heard the word “English” start with the same sound as inside, while “engage” and your other examples start with the same sound as entertain.
While you're right, I feel like there's no safe argument to make here, because some group somewhere will pronounce some word in a certain way, so there can't really be a blanket rule.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is probably connected. Having so many different dialects (and full minor languages!) saying the same word slightly differently, Italians were forced to find (and use) a way to put the correct accent in writing. Other languages probably don't have the mind boggling number of dialects Italy has. GP was not exaggerating, it really changes every few kilometers. Like the article says: "situations like these are surpris…
Italian script doesn't use diacritics, though, so it's not the same kind of accent as the article talks about.
Italian script most definitely requires diacritics.
"è" (is) vs "e" (and)
"pero" (pear tree) vs "però" (but)
"perché" is the only correct one and "perche" and "perchè" do not exist
and so many other examples.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#187The Godwin vignette at the beginning is such a clever way to dramatize what would otherwise be a dry spelling shift. Also, I never realized the irony that English avoids diacritics because of French influence
> Also, I never realized the irony that English avoids diacritics because of French influence But is that why they avoid diacritics? It sounds like English probably wouldn't have had diacritics even if the Normans hadn't come in. Seeing my son try to learn to read things like "cycle", I feel like diacritics would make English writing a lot more accessible.
Diacritics wouldn't have helped moderns if they were in from the beginning - most of the confusing words used to be pronounced like they are spelled (at least to people of the time). Maybe they would have helped to petrify pronunciations and slowed or stopped linguistic drift but I somewhat doubt that given historical literacy rates.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#188Ai blív ingliš šud imbreis diakritiks, ounli daunsaid ai sí is it wud spel dí end of speling bí kompetišns. Pun intendid.
You don't even use them consistently in the same sentence (your unaccented i has at least 3 different values, for instance).
The real reason English spelling is frozen in the 1600s is that that is the last time all English speakers had a common language community. Since the foundation of the colonies, Englishes have diverged from each other from that starting point, so that no reform can be neutral to all current Englishes - some have merged what was distinct in early modern English (e.g. cot-caught merger); while in other cases what was a single class has been split (e.g. the bath-trap split). Wikipedia has a (non-comprehensive) table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_correspondences_between_...; note for example that even where two varieties have merged phonemes, they might have merged them differently (compare Southern American to Australian). You might try to come up with a spelling system that covers all possible combinations, but it would be then very hard for the speakers who have mergers (i.e. all of them) to use - how is an Australian supposed to know which äː vowels are æ in American and which are ɑ? How are the Americans supposed to know which ɑ's are äː vs ɒ in Australia? etc. etc.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Read and read are the same exact fucking letters and are pronounced differently. You really don't need to go very far to find many examples. English is fucked up. The only way to learn how to speak it properly is by memorization. Other languages like Spanish or Korean keep a near-perfect one to one correspondence between written form and expected pronunciation.
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> In my native language these kinds of errors are impossible as how you pronounce letters doesn't change depending on the word they are in
Don't forget when the pronunciation depends solely on the meaning.
Live or Live?
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Italian script doesn't use diacritics, though, so it's not the same kind of accent as the article talks about.
Italian script most definitely requires diacritics. "è" (is) vs "e" (and) "pero" (pear tree) vs "però" (but) "perché" is the only correct one and "perche" and "perchè" do not exist and so many other examples.
Oh huh, I've forgotten more Italian than I thought, thanks for the correction!