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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#431

Post by coffeeling »

inigoalonso wrote: post #153
dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it. is there no accent variation in Spanish? Such a 1:1 system would never work in English, because the way words are pronounced can be very different in e.g. Melbourne, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Boston, for example.

You're right to point out that English pronunciation varies widely across regions, but that doesn't fully negate the value of a systematic orthography. What germandiago is referring to is the relationship between graphemes (letters) and phonemes (sounds). Spanish has a highly phonemic orthography, meaning the rules for converting letters to sounds (and vice versa) are consistent and predictable. Yes, there are accent…

I don't know if Korean is ultimately that good. Hangeul are a monstrous improvement over the old mixed script (which itself is better than the Japanese iteration because the Koreans only used Chinese characters for Chinese loans), but it still has a lot of sound change rules and can be a bit of a pain to read because of how letters flow to the next syllable. It's not in the same league with Finnish or Spanish, at any rate.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#432

Post by hbn »

sotix wrote: post #412
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.

You can always tell someone who is well read in English when they mispronounce everything they say. Greek is so much easier than English to pronounce words correctly.

If anything, I'd guess that when speaking English as second language, harder than knowing the accents on words would just be keeping track of all the exceptions in pronunciation between words that you basically just have to memorize. Tough, though, taught, thought, through, thorough, throughout, etc.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#433

Post by aimanbenbaha »

johnnyjeans wrote: post #312
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.

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…

If Arabic had to cater to afro-asiatic dialects phonemes then the script would have been even more messier. I'm a speaker of one, and my dialect is heavily influenced by the indigenous Tamazight language. and I think this is why many of the Amazigh community were and some still disappointed with the neo-Tifinagh script. While it carries symbolic weight, it doesn’t offer practical readability, phonemic clarity and tech accessibility of a modern script that Tamazight deserves. Latin script, ironically, fits Tamazight much more naturally.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#434

Post by adolph »

cvoss wrote: post #355

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.

For the record, Wikipedia states they are diacritics. I'm leaning toward agreeing due to this observation: "In most Latin-based orthographies, the lowercase letter i conventionally has its dot replaced when a diacritical mark atop the letter, such as a tilde or caron, is placed." Ex: aeiouyj, âêîôûyj, äëïöüÿj, áéíóúyj́ (oops, my example shows an accent above the J's tittle–down one, but three up)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tittle

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#435

Post by eesmith »

6P58r3MXJSLi wrote: post #376
eesmith wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and how do those entirely true observations connect to the non-use of diacritics in English? I pointed out the ship example from the text, which was used to demonstrate how "this early French influence over English, which arose from the Norman Conquest, is the beginning of the reason why English is written without accent marks. ... This was the French habit that the Normans brought to England: the use of extra l…

> "is the beginning of the reason why English is written without accent marks" > sh, th, ee, oo, ou That's cool 'n all, but I believe that only applies to French writing in English for English people. Many languages have combinations of letters that have a single sound, it's no excuse for not having accents. In German one can write strasse and straße or müller and mueller (different writing, same sound). They too don…

> but I believe that only applies to French writing in English for English people

Shrug. Yes, languages have different paths in their evolution. Film at 11.

I still like what this linguistics PhD wrote about the specific history of one aspect of English language evolution.

> English doesn't make sense

That is of course an exaggeration. Just because the rules are complex and full of exceptions doesn't mean there's no sense. Even if you reject all of linguistics, Shannon in “Prediction and entropy of printed English”, demonstrated that English is compressible, which means there must be some patterns.

Now to drink some maté.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#436

Post by jsbg »

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.

As an ESL person I do wish English used accents the way Spanish does to indicate what syllable has the primary emphasis.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#437

Post by codethief »

thechao wrote: post #401
pif wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you're trying to to argue something like: I'm arguing exactly what I wrote: a phonetic language is one when you can see a written word and pronounce it correctly, without knowing what it means and without having ever heard it before. Edit - as an example, consider "door" and "pool": the written form is not sufficient to guess the sound to associate to the double o.

Which language is phonetic? I think you're beating around the bush here; you claim English isn't phonetic, but which language is ?

Spanish and Italian are.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#438

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#439

Post by coffeeling »

efilife wrote: post #68
salomonk_mur wrote: post #50

Earlier 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.

[flagged]

A Dutch man wrote an amazing poem highlighting the absurdity of English orthography: https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/cha...

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#440

Post by hbn »

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…

You can frequently do that in English too. Of course there are exceptions, but if anything it's typically because of words/names from other languages.

In my experience learning Spanish, their loan words are Spanish-ized, being made to be pronounced and spelled in a format that makes more sense in Spanish. Whereas in English, the pronunciation and spelling is usually taken more directly from the source, so you get a bunch of instances where a word's spelling doesn't really match its pronunciation.

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