Earlier quoted context omitted.
Italian here... Are you from the south of Italy, by any chance? Because I'm from there and it's exactly how you describe it.
Yeah, from near Urbino but moved to USA ~20 years ago.
Urbino is more like Central Italy.
Why English doesn't use accents
461–470 of 615 posts
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
The rules are very clear on when those are used though, you are not really arguing the original point imo. What are the dialectical variations in "ll" and "c"?
(B2-ish Spanish learner here but) "ll" is pronounced in at least three variants that I know of: "y", "j", and something between "sh" and "ch". E.g. "llama" might be pronounced like (in English writing) "yama", "zhama", or "shama". The last one really threw me for a while; it's super common in Argentina at least.
AFAIK "ll" can also be the palatalized "l" sound in some dialects, i.e. in the same relationship to regular "l" as "ñ" is to "n". Indeed, this is the original pronunciation from which all others have diverged.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#463French.. you people have no idea how Italy is. I speak differently than my brothers because I grew up at my grandparents 3 MILES! away and if I go to my family restaurant 2 MILES the other direction there is a different accent again, and I mean different words too not just the sound. Where I used to go to school 10 miles away they don't understand if I speak my dialect because it's a different region. The whole Italy…
You think that's bad, visit your friends to the East in Slovenia. You'd think they're doing it on purpose! How do so few people in such a small area make so many variations in the "same" language?
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#464Earlier 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.
> Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it. IMHO purely phonemic orthography makes orthography unnecessary complex, as there are language features like assimilation[1] that happens naturally in spoken form but does not make sense in written form. In contrast, morphophonemic orthography keeps systematic and consistent mapping between spoken and written form for individ…
An orthography that surfaces (non-phonemic) assimilation would be phonetic rather than phonemic. For example, many languages assimilate "n" to "m" before "b", but the phoneme is still /n/, and native speakers are often not even aware that this assimilation occurs (which is what indicates that it's still the same phoneme).
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is trivia that is useless in almost all contexts. I've been a native English speaker all my life and this is the first I've heard of that. I can't think of any situation in life where knowing that fact would have been helpful. Your claim seems reasonable, but if someone says you are wrong I wouldn't fact check it even if clear links were posted so that I could.
If you’re seeing a word for the first time, it is pretty useful - partly with pronunciation but definitely with meaning. You do have to have some familiarity with the source languages, but if it’s an unfamiliar but nativized word, those are almost always ultimately Latin or Greek.
If you're seeing the word for the first time and need to figure out how to pronounce it, how would you know that “y” is acting as a vowel and not as a consonant in the first place?
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules Not really. There's no way to guess how many english words are pronounced based on the written form, unless you've heard it before. And of course the pronunciation may vary wildly based on region/country as well. The most telling evidence of this is the existence of Spelling Bee competitions in english language countries.…
I disagree. For whatever reason, most proficient readers I know have an intuition about the correct pronunciation of a word even if they’ve never heard it spoken before. And even if they use an intuitive pronunciation that isn’t identical to standard pronunciation, they’ll still be understood. Spelling bee is the opposite direction, going from pronunciation to spelling; not a fair comparison.
> For whatever reason, most proficient readers I know have an intuition about the correct pronunciation of a word even if they’ve never heard it spoken before.
Because pronunciation rules exist, they're just never explicitly taught and instead learned through exposure. For example, here's someone reconstructing as many of the rules as they can: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#467I 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.
Agreed. Honestly you don’t even need most punctuation. In about five minutes any literate English speaker can learn to read at full speed with no spaces or other punctuation. Or upside down. Or at an almost arbitrary angle. I taught myself this when I was learning Japanese 30 years ago to prove a point. Now it’s merely an interesting trick but one with an interesting staying power: with zero practice I maintain the a…
Punctuation was indeed a later addition to Latin, as well as lowercase letters.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
When is something a dialect in France and when is it a language in France?
> It seemed to me that you were overestimating how prevalent or significant these languages were.
I said I was in sixth grade, a kid living in the US.
I didn't even know then there was more than one Romance language in Italy - as I alluded to in my original comment.
Yes, I now, decades later, know more. But I was sharing my childhood misapprehension and how I learned the world was more complicated than 11 year old me thought as something meant for others to smile at and enjoy, not to be nitpicked as if my comment was any profound statement about all of France.
My interpretation was not "questionable" - the story clearly was supposed to take place in a part of France where many of those in the countryside still learned a Romance language other than French as their mother tongue. That matches the real history for that supposed area that the author drew from. Yes, it's certainly something that's a lot less common now, some 50 years later. But then just say that things have changed.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I want to know who thought that chinese transliterated into "english characters" should use a whole bunch of q, x and zs to represent sounds in a way that no other english word does. Why is Zhou pronounced that way?!
How would you spell that sound in a way that is consistently recognized?
"zh" is actually one of the more reasonable pinyin digraphs because it follows the same pattern as "sh". If "s" + "h" results in [ʃ], then logically "z" + "h" should result in [ʒ].
"c" is used the way pinyin uses it in many languages (e.g. pretty much all Slavic ones that use the Latin alphabet, for starters).
"x" and "q" are more questionable, but there's precedent for either in languages using Latin-based alphabets - "x" can be [ʃ] in Spanish, for example, and "q" is [c͡ç] in Albanian.
Re: Why English doesn't use accents
#470Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In fact, I'm inclined to think that there are actually two different sounds in English as well; "witch" and "Charlie" don't feel the same in my mouth. There aren't. > I think there are other romanizations where the 'q' sound is represented "tch". Well, maybe; there are a large number of romanizations of Mandarin. But there are no significant romanizations where that is true. It's q in pinyin, ch' in Wade-Giles, and…
> qu and chou are aspirated; ju and zhou aren't. ...Compare [ref] So the idea here is that chou and zhou are related in a similar way that the t's in "top" and "stop" are related: your mouth and vocal cords are doing the same thing, but in one case you have the puff of air and the other you don't. At any rate, going back to the original question: the logic behind the choice is still consistent. On this classification…
Languages usually have either the voiced/unvoiced distinction as phonemic, or the aspirated/unaspirated distinction. In the former case unvoiced consonants often have aspirated allophones as in English, and in the latter case unaspirated consonants often have voiced allophones especially between vowels, as in Chinese or Korean. Hence why it makes sense to map the two in this manner - if your native language uses aspiration as the primary feature, and you hear someone who uses voicing, your brain will generally map it "automatically" for you, and their speech will sound weird but understandable.
(But then you get Hindi with a four-way distinction, both voiced/unvoiced and aspirated/unaspirated in all possible combinations.)