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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#351

Post by bcatanzaro »

JambalayaJimbo wrote: post #332
williamdclt wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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”

How would you account for the fact that for many words, there isn't a consistent pronunciation rule for it at all? For example, I would guess that 50% of English speakers are non-rhotic.

English pronunciation does vary quite widely and it would be difficult to rewrite all the books and websites into all the different accents.

It's also decentralized - there's no authority to tell the English-speaking community how to spell things or how to say things.

I think these are both advantages that outweigh the phonetic inconsistency.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#352

Post by throw7 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #276
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…

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.

cue GIF pronunciation war.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#353

Post by mousethatroared »

bluGill wrote: post #313
devilbunny wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s fairly good at helping us understand the etymology. Have a “y” acting as a vowel in the spelling? Good chance it’s Greek. Have a “k”? Almost certainly not Latin.

That is trivia that is useless in almost all contexts. I've been a native English speaker all my life and this is the first I've heard of that. I can't think of any situation in life where knowing that fact would have been helpful. Your claim seems reasonable, but if someone says you are wrong I wouldn't fact check it even if clear links were posted so that I could.

Im a materials scientist and I use etymology every day.

Knowing etymology is a an easy way to memorize things.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#354

Post by foobiekr »

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.

Agreed.

Honestly you don’t even need most punctuation.

In about five minutes any literate English speaker can learn to read at full speed with no spaces or other punctuation. Or upside down. Or at an almost arbitrary angle.

I taught myself this when I was learning Japanese 30 years ago to prove a point. Now it’s merely an interesting trick but one with an interesting staying power: with zero practice I maintain the ability.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#355

Post by cvoss »

Do the tittles on `i` and `j` count as diacritics? In English those vowel symbols never appear without their tittles. (In contrast, the related vowel symbol `y`, which is like an `ij` combo and is named "Greek I" in French, never appears with tittles!) In some sense, the glyphs are idiomatically atomic with the diacritics permanently stuck to them.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#356

Post by mousethatroared »

jgwil2 wrote: post #248
hyperpape wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But English orthography isn't meant to serve foreigners. Or natives. It is slower for children to learn to read English than other languages.

Teaching my toddler to read now and I definitely feel like if we spoke Spanish my work would be done already.

I learned how to read in six months.

My kid took two and half years.

The Chinese take 10 years.

So what? Are the Chinese terribly educated?

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#357

Post by taeric »

pif wrote: post #348
taeric wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No it isn't. Pedantically, English the language is definitionally phonetic, as it is spoken. Sign language is not phonetic, nor are things like smoke signals/traffic signals/etc.

Just as it would be silly to claim that Japanese is not phonetic. Of course spoken Japanese is phonetic. They even have two fully regular alphabets that can both express the same phonemes, but are used for different reasons. As well, they have a completely logographic set that does not relate to phonemes, even though it is used for most writing.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#358

Post by bcatanzaro »

pif wrote: post #341
bluGill wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#359

Post by zahlman »

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,…

> how each word is pronounced individually. What the hell is the difference between "men" and "man"? What's the difference between "bitch" and "beach"?

From what I could easily research, Portuguese has a pretty wide variety of vowel sounds, but it still pales in comparison to the Germanic languages that English took from; and across the spectrum of English dialects and accents you can end up hearing pretty much anything vowel-like that the human voice apparatus can generate. The strength of the difference between "men" and "man" will depend on who's speaking, but it's generally less than Portuguese phonology can accommodate. The "e" sound here should be familiar; the "a" sound not so much. Spanish (and, say, Japanese) learners of English will have much the same problem, but more so; their natural "e" is a bit off.

(From what Wikipedia is telling me, many Brazilian Portuguese dialects will use the right /ɪ/ sound for "bitch" in unstressed syllables. But then, my local accent contrasts /ɪ/ with /i/ quite strongly.)

On the flip side, I struggled with pronouncing Dutch when I made a brief attempt to pick it up; the individual sounds are all straightforward enough, but certain combinations are really unnatural.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#360

Post by zahlman »

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…

Just because something is complete nonsense, doesn't mean it can't be enjoyable.
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