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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#361

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

jcranmer wrote: post #36
amelius wrote: post #12

English doesn't use accents because the speakers don't give a __ about the correspondence between the written form and the pronunciation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

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…

You're correct on the reasons why "ghoti" cannot be pronounced like "fish," but what your explanation illustrates is that the mapping from English spelling to pronunciation is extremely nuanced - needlessly so.

A more direct phonetic writing system, like many other languages have, would make it much easier to learn how to read and write English.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#362

Post by zahlman »

jcranmer wrote: post #36
amelius wrote: post #12

English doesn't use accents because the speakers don't give a __ about the correspondence between the written form and the pronunciation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

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…

> Even turning the 'o' into /ɪ/ relies on fairly regular vowel destressing

Isn't the "o" in "women" stressed?

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#363

Post by johnnyjeans »

williamdclt wrote: post #328
johnnyjeans wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2nding this. The "non-phonetic alphabet" is the biggest non-issue I see people raise a stink about. It really doesn't matter, context is the heavy-weight backbone of language. On top of that, I think people really underestimate how inappropriate diacritics would be for English. It has a massive phonemic inventory, with 44 unique items. Compare with Spanish's 24. English's "phonetic" writing system would have to be as…

> 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”

> Most of us still mispronounce some words

The bureaucratization of language is more problematic in my view, where things are seen as wrong and right and we try to cram the beauty of of natural language into a restricted box that can be cleanly and easily defined and worked with universally. I quite literally have nothing but detest for this conception of language, that it must bend to the whims of rigidity when it's very clearly a natural, highly chaotic dynamic system constantly undergoing evolution in unexpected ways.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#364

Post by Aardwolf »

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.

Also agree, you can already use combinations of multiple characters to define other sounds, and that's faster to type too

Shame, though, that in English the sounds that combinations of characters make, aren't well or uniquely defined (e.g. bird, word, hurt, heard, herd, ... all sound like the same vowel)

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#365

Post by johnnyjeans »

codeflo wrote: post #330
johnnyjeans wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2nding this. The "non-phonetic alphabet" is the biggest non-issue I see people raise a stink about. It really doesn't matter, context is the heavy-weight backbone of language. On top of that, I think people really underestimate how inappropriate diacritics would be for English. It has a massive phonemic inventory, with 44 unique items. Compare with Spanish's 24. English's "phonetic" writing system would have to be as…

> It has a massive phonemic inventory, with 44 unique items. Compare with Spanish's 24, or German's 25. I'm not sure where you're getting these numbers from, but German has around 45 phonemes according to all sources I could find, depending on how you count: 17 vowels (including two different schwa sounds), 3 diphthongs, 25 consonants.

Edited for accuracy, thanks.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#366

Post by bunderbunder »

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,…

I think that's probably more because English uses etymological orthography.

So spelling rules are based on four distinct "primary" systems of phonics that can be used depending on whether the word or morpheme has a Germanic, Greek, Latin or French origin. (Yes I know French comes from Latin origin, but the spelling rules differ depending on whether the word was imported directly from Latin, or came in via Norman French.) And then the Germanic and French origin words can get even messier because their spelling was standardized before the Great Vowel Shift. And then whenever we take loanwords from other languages that use the Latin alphabet, we preserve that language's spelling. Which creates a whole mess of special cases where the spelling doesn't follow any of the regular phonetic rules.

If you look at languages where the writing system is famously difficult to learn, a common element they all share is etymological orthography.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#367

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

wizardforhire wrote: post #326
amelius wrote: post #12

English doesn't use accents because the speakers don't give a __ about the correspondence between the written form and the pronunciation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

Yep! Not only that but people will actively mispronounce words as a form of vetting. Mispronunciations also becoming a form of tribal identity. Speaking of American vs proper English. America is the most diverse cultural landscape in human history . If you stay put, you won’t see it. Start traveling around the country and its the only thing you see. this is not hyperbole. Sure other places are diverse, however becaus…

America is diverse in some ways, but in terms of language and dialects (which is what we're discussing here), America is remarkably homogeneous. There are many tiny countries with more linguistic diversity than the US.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#368

Post by dinfinity »

palmfacehn wrote: post #289
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.

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.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#369

Post by dragonwriter »

taeric wrote: post #357
pif wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

We're discussing features of written language ("phonetic" -- or the etymologically related "phonological") is a way of categorizing writing systems by their relationship to spoken language.

> Of course spoken Japanese is phonetic

"Phonetic" is not a feature of spoken language, but of the relation between other language forms (usually, written, but you could make the same distinction for, say, sign languages) and spoken language.

> They even have two fully regular alphabets

I assume from "two fully regular" you are referring to hiragana and katakana, but those are syllabaries, not alphabets. (Romaji is an alphabetic system, though, but I don't know where you'd find a second one.)

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#370

Post by pif »

taeric wrote: post #357
pif wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

The issue at the start of the conversation is not about speaking or gesturing. It is about using the Latin alphabet properly (i.e. phonetically, as it was designed) or "with some imagination" as the English does.
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