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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#381

Post by dawnofdusk »

devnullbrain wrote: post #295
bloak wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Economist uses diacritics in French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish words, but deletes the diacritics from other languages (or maybe they keep them when they happen to resemble diacritics from those languages). I think I once saw a letter from a Hungarian complaining about that: a word they'd used meant something silly or obscene after they'd removed the diacritic.

Most publications are haphazard like this. The diacritic example also applies to Vietnamese, despite the alphabet coming from Portuguese. Similarly, Chinese and Korean names are usually written in the order they are pronounced, while Japanese names are reversed.

>Similarly, Chinese and Korean names are usually written in the order they are pronounced, while Japanese names are reversed.

As a Chinese speaker this is maddeningly confusing when reading Western media. It's also a fairly new trend, I want to say a decade ago Chinese and Korean names were also read in Western order.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#382

Post by alephnerd »

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.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#383

Post by zahlman »

o11c wrote: post #98
simondotau wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think that’s crazy, consider that “English” is the only word in the English language that spells the /ɪŋ/ (‘ing’) sound as “eng”.

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…

In my local (dialect and) accent all of these words have a pretty clear initial /ɛ/ and not /ɪ/. (But also: /ɪ/ usually contrasts strongly with /i/ here, but the sound before /ŋ/ is almost a third in-between vowel.)

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#384

Post by SllX »

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 mean that might be part of it, but also because the internet developed out of the ARPAnet which was a United States Department of Defense project, at a time when the United States was one of two superpowers (right as the other superpower stopped being a superpower or for that matter a state), in a world that already gave pretty heavy weight towards English as the lingua franca in international institutions after World War II or simply because it was the lowest-common denominator in a lot of the world post-the British Empire.

English had a lot of wind beneath its wings. Still does.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#385

Post by wmgries »

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.

Some Americans clearly must do this, but personally, I've never heard this in my life until I saw it on a YouTube video of a British person complaining how Americans pronounce words. Obviously, your experience may vary - it's a big country.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#386

Post by athenot »

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.

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 information processing standard for electronic data interchange between federal agencies. This order was known as... Executive Order 11110 :)

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#387

Post by RiverCrochet »

gwd wrote: post #143
germandiago wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a spanish I could say the most challenging part of english is the lack of consistency between how you write something and how you pronounce it. Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it. English is a bit messy regarding to this, for whatever reasons.

My son's first year teacher said (I may have the numbers slightly wrong) that Spanish has 23 phonemes (sounds the mouth makes) and 23 graphemes (ways to write sounds). English, on the other hand, has 43 phonemes and over 500 graphemes.

Spanish "maps" very nicely but even Spanish isn't exactly 1:1

- /k/ can be written both c and qu, and k where it occasionally appears in the language (e.g. kilo) - and the u in qu is silent.

- /s/ can be written c, s, and z, though stress rules are different for c and z.

- r and rr are distinct sounds but r = rr at the beginning of words, I think.

- At least in Mexican Spanish: The "ua" sound can be spelled ua or oa (e.g. Michoacan, Oaxaca) - and also the breathy sound of j can also be written with an x.

- d has a sound a little like English voiced-th at the end of words (e.g. juventud)

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#388

Post by dragonmost »

williamdclt wrote: post #324
mamonoleechi wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accents in french are pretty irrelevant, you can totally ignore them and master the language. Most french people ignore them while chatting/mailing/texting online. If you ignore accents, some words can be mistaken for other words (with different accents), but if you check the context, the problem quickly go away. Accents are just useful to help you pronounce correctly words ; they are also a hint about the word's ori…

> Accents in french are pretty irrelevant, you can totally ignore them and master the language. Most french people ignore them while chatting/mailing/texting online. “Master” would definitely not be correct, but you could write intelligibly enough indeed. It will cause you issues here and there (not being taken seriously, having some miscommunications when the diacritic disambiguates the word…) If you can’t read the…

I feel not being understood when pronunciation is off is more of a France french issue. You will be understood eitherway in Canada (given you speak with french Canadians). But I sometime have difficulty being understood by frenchmans, less so with other french speaking cultures

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#389

Post by taeric »

dragonwriter wrote: post #369
taeric wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spok…

Phonetic is absolutely a feature linked to spoken languages, though? It quite literally is relating to spoken sounds. Sign language, for example, is not phonetic, as many users of it cannot speak or hear.

Fair that I should have said they have two phonetic writing systems, decidedly not alphabets. I'm not sure the distinction is one that matters for what we are covering here?

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#390

Post by taeric »

pif wrote: post #370
taeric wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The alphabet is used to communicate the spoken words. Not the concepts or something else, literally the spoken words. Is a big part of why slang is so popular in fiction settings, as they would use the letter to convey pronunciation. Because the letters generally represent phonemes.
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