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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#391

Post by louthy »

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…

It is my favourite language to read and write.

I am English though.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#392

Post by palmfacehn »

wmgries wrote: post #385
dinfinity wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The transatlantic dispute over "aluminum/aluminium" seems minor when you consider how English is used globally. Even within Britain, there are considerable variations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglosphere#/media/File:Anglos...

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#393

Post by dragonwriter »

taeric wrote: post #389
dragonwriter wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Phonetic is absolutely a feature linked to spoken languages, though?

It's a feature linked to spoken languages, since it is a feature of the relation of non-spoken (usually written) language to a spoken language.

But it is not a feature of a spoken language.

> Sign language, for example, is not phonetic, as many users of it cannot speak or hear.

Yes, in causal terms, the fact many users of sign languages aren't familiar with the sounds of the spoken language is a reason sign languages tend not be phonetic, but they are not phonetic in definitional terms because the symbols in the sign language do not represent the sounds of spoken language.

But it would make no sense to call a spoken language phonetic (except maybe if it was a code for a different spoken language, in which the phonemes in one mapped to the individual phonemes, rather than ideas, of the other.)

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#394

Post by williamdclt »

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.

To be clear, I'm not particularly advocating for making english a phonetic language. I'm just saying it being non-phonetic does cause issues (and makes it frustrating, but also shows a very interesting history).

Assuming we wanted to make English a phonetic language, then your question is kind of moot: phonetic means we need to pick the pronunciation rules for phonemes, which would make other ways to pronounce these phonemes incorrect. Some of currently-correct english would become incorrect english.

> For example, I would guess that 50% of English speakers are non-rhotic

Note that accent isn't really what people talk about when they complain about pronunciation. The problem is that there's no mapping from letters to phoneme in any english accent: laughter/slaughter, draught/draught, G(a)vin/D(a)vid...

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#395

Post by owenversteeg »

We do, of course, use accents and other diacritics. It's not as common as in other languages, but most people will come across a few each day. The popular argument here is that many are French, with the accents optional, yet soupçon and exposé are rarely written naked. If you want non-French, pick up the New Yorker and you will find coöperative and reëlect, or a poem to find changèd and learnèd. We use them in names, from Brontë to Beyoncé.

There is an excellent Wikipedia article that goes into detail on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical...

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#396

Post by anthk »

RiverCrochet wrote: post #387
gwd wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not an issue with /s/ in Iberian Spanish. Once you have 'distinción', most ortography errors I've read overseas plummet down there.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#397

Post by ViscountPenguin »

athenot wrote: post #386
alephnerd wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 informa…

Do you have a source for the executive order claim? I can't find it on this list of executive orders signed by Lydon Johnson, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_executive_actions_by... . And as far as I can tell the claim originates on ascii-code.com and spread from there?

Googling executive order 11110 gives no primary information.

Edit: found it https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/memorandum-approvi...

It's just not an executive order as far as I can tell. Not an expert on US governance by any means though.

Edit 2: I mixed up Executive orders and Actions it seems?

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#398

Post by o11c »

zahlman wrote: post #383
o11c wrote: post #98

Earlier 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…

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.)

Sorry, I was sloppy and wrote /i/ rather than trying to dig up how to enter the correct vowel when I was focused on the "ng".

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#399

Post by anthk »

gus_massa wrote: post #251
pxndxx wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah there are multiple accents in Spanish, but each accent is still a 1:1 mapping from written word to pronunciation, there's no enough/through/dough nonsense.

For example for a small car ("auto") you say and write: In Argentina: "autito" In Colombia: "autico" In Spain: "autillo" the same rule applies for all words, not only for cars.

In Spain you'll listen the three cases at once and all of them are perfectly valid.

-ito it's almost the universal way everywhere in the Hispanic world.

-ico it's widely used in the South of Navarre and Aragón and everyone will understand you. Heck, it's the diminutive from used by the hick people, and thus, it's uber known, altough you might look like a bumfuck village redneck sheepherd with a beret by using -ico outside of Navarre/Aragón.

-illo it's more from the South, but, again, understood everywhere.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#400

Post by taeric »

dragonwriter wrote: post #393
taeric wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Phonetic is absolutely a feature linked to spoken languages, though? It's a feature linked to spoken languages, since it is a feature of the relation of non-spoken (usually written) language to a spoken language. But it is not a feature of a spoken language. > Sign language, for example, is not phonetic, as many users of it cannot speak or hear. Yes, in causal terms, the fact many users of sign languages aren't fam…

It absolutely is a feature of spoken languages. It is in contrast to vocalizations, specifically because it is about speech and not just the sounds animals can make.

I get what you are aiming at, but phonetics is about speech. Is why you can reliably say how many phonemes different languages have. If you had to cover all vocalizations that people could do, you would have a bit more trouble.

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