Earlier quoted context omitted.
cue GIF pronunciation war.
It's not pronounced "jraphics interchange format", therefore hard G
And yet it is gif like in gin and giraffe...
Why English doesn't use accents
441–450 of 615 posts
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#442I 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,…
> What the hell is the difference between "men" and "man"? What's the difference between "bitch" and "beach"?
Those words all have completely different vowels in English; they're not irregular spellings. If you can't tell the difference, you probably just haven't listened to enough English or have said them incorrectly too much to tell the difference.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You are wrong on several levels. 1 - Being fluent in the national language does not prevent people from maintaining their dialects in parallel. 2 - Whether a language is phonetic has no relation to political issues concerning dialects. 3 - Whether a language is phonetic has no relation to whether people like to use it. 4 - English got decentralized starting with the Age of Sail, but the lack of correspondence between…
being fluent in a language makes you less likely to be interested in a second when everyone speaks the first. This plays out over generations in killing the less common languages.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only þ (thorn) died with the printing of Caxton's Bible using y-, for cost reasons. The other letters -- ƿ (wynn), æ (ash), and ð (eth) -- went out of use long before movable type printing. https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/the-lost-letters-of-th...
Þe 'ae' glyph is still used in printed English, e.g. spelling of 'Encyclopaedia', 'paedophile' Similarly þhe 'oe' glyph is also used, often in medical contexts. Þe loss of þorn is somewhat sad, as it is still easily understood by native speakers when substituted for its modern digraph.
As I understand it, æ was a letter in Old English while Þe same glyph in Modern English is a ligature, wið no linguistic connection between the two.
Last year at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267080 I found that in the 1800s the ligatures æ, œ, fl, ff, ffi, fi and ffl were pretty common in type collections.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Over 50 in rural communities" in one of the more sparsely populated areas of France makes for a very small slice of the population even in that area, and even then, as pointed out, French is spoken by everyone. On top of that, it is more "anyone who speaks limousin is likely over 50, and in a rural community", than "anyone over 50 in rural communities in that area likely speaks Limousin". There are 10k speakers of L…
> and even then, as pointed out, French is spoken by everyone. Yes, as even the Malevil quote I gave pointed out. (At least by school age.) > On top of that, it is more The book was written over 50 years ago, so the Wikipedia article about present day use of Limousin isn't all that indicative of what it was like for the adult characters in the book, who would have been born before 1950. > There are 10k speakers of Li…
> Why do you describe it as dialect of French?
Did I? I mentioned dialects in France, not of French, IIRC.
I'm nitpicking because, TBH, I quite likely just read too much into your use of "astounded" in your original comment. It seemed to me that you were overestimating how prevalent or significant these languages were.
By the mid-20th century, they were already quite less popular and even less so by the time Malevil took place (1977, I take it, even though it was written a few years earlier), especially when it came to being taught before French.
At the same time, I guess I was maybe as surprised to learn that Louisiana French is still a thing as you were about these areas in France. :)
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Specifically to english and dialects, you are correct. England proper has a different dialect and accent for every nook! London for literal neighborhoods! It also has several hundred if not thousand of years on the US for language to develop. Africa has everyone beat on this front. Bantu alone has who knows how many sublanguages! America has done a pretty remarkable thing in keeping its language internally consistent despite it’s overwhelming cultural diversity and influences! That it sucks to learn for the uninitiated is exactly for this reason.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#447English 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
Indeed, you could never tell how an English word is pronounced unless you “just know”. And then it's still inconsistent (e.g. finite / infinite).
Most English words are regular, and most commonly used ones too. "the", "be", "are", "why", "can", "might", "life", etc. are all perfectly regular if you understand how to read english orthography (which uses character clusters and can't be read a letter at a time).
Infinite/finite regularly related, too - the reason the pronunciation of the finite cluster changes is due to stress differences (initial in- always takes the stress, and then the following syllable must be destressed). Note that the long vowel at the end comes back in the 4 syllable "infinitum", again due to regular stress rules.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to the article, Norman influence led to double letters being used to better mark out sounds, which achieves the same as diacritics. It made English mostly good enough (failures like 'lead' are rare). Being good enough, and lacking a strong central authority, the language only accepted a conservative standardisation, and avoided larger changes such as including diacritics. Without these Norman changes, there…
Well, the "lead issue" could be fixed by writing the verb "leed" (after all, it's exactly the same sound as in the word "queen" mentioned in the article), but for some reason this hasn't happened...
It happened in newspaper jargon for the leading sentence of an article (though they used the spelling "lede" instead), because "lead" was already a metonym for hot type (which was cast out of the metal).
It hasn't happened otherwise presumably because the risk of confusion is normally very low when not in a Pb-filled context.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#449Earlier 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”
> 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…
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Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#450I 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.
I also wouldn’t go as far as saying that it’s a shame that English does not use diacritics, on the other hand, I also wouldn’t say that diacritics make a language more difficult.
Learning how to use them in Spanish and German takes about an afternoon, and when it comes to learning languages, that’s a negligible amount of time.