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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#481

Post by tracker1 »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #472
sotix wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Coming from Spanish, with just the right diacritics to make pronunciation obvious, at first I didn't get the concept of a "Spelling Bee". Did it involve something besides spelling? Did "Bee" was a metaphor for the actual hard part of it? I was first exposed to written English, so after trying conversational English, I learned why its pronunciation/writing is a national competition. It might as well be random. English…

Possibly... English has a lot of linguistics with a lot of varied roots. You have many words taken from Old Norse and other Scandinavian influence as well as Latin, French and via proxy Greek derived words. Great Britain was highly fought over, contested, changed hands and merged cultures over the millennia.

It is far more organic and mixed from different sources than many prescribed languages or very local dialects of other languages. It would be very hard to pin that down. Not to mention the history of printing presses themselves, such as how the Thorn character was itself replaced as well as deprecating a few other characters that were in common use in earlier Old English.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#482

Post by int_19h »

cenamus wrote: post #171
dvh wrote: post #163

Ai blív ingliš šud imbreis diakritiks, ounli daunsaid ai sí is it wud spel dí end of speling bí kompetišns. Pun intendid.

Czech diacritics taking over the world :-)

You'd be surprised! I actually see a fair amount of haceks hereabouts in PNW because they are used in the orthography of the local Salish Native American languages, so you end up with road signs like these: https://www.charkoosta.com/news/salish-language-stop-signs-e...

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#483

Post by int_19h »

kergonath wrote: post #419
cvoss wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I will never be able to pronounce correctly a word I never heard before. This happens not infrequently to native English speakers. It's especially prominent for people who read a lot when they're young and develop a large vocabulary that doesn't get socialized until much later. My English teacher, of all people, was notorious for this. Real life examples from native speakers: Emphasizing the wrong syllable in "fora…

This is my experience as well. I would just add > Emphasizing the wrong syllable As a native French speaker, I will never be able to emphasise the right syllable in any language, ever :D Stress is just not really a thing in French, and it is quite difficult to get it intuitively later in life.

It's fairly easy when the stress is consistent or mostly so. In English thought it's a phonemic feature in its own right so there's no general rule to memorize in the first place - you just have to learn it for each word.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#484

Post by tracker1 »

int_19h wrote: post #452
johnnyjeans wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Diacritics don't need to be used the way they are in French, i.e. to preserve the original spelling. On the contrary, most languages use them to make their spelling more phonetic. Nor is there a need for some insane kind of diacritics to handle English. Its phonemic inventory is considerable, yes, but it can be easily organized, especially when you keep in mind that many distinct sounds are allophones (and thus don't…

Now try to get close to a billion people around the world with already varied cultures to follow the "new" rules of their native language.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#485

Post by int_19h »

cardanome wrote: post #284
jgalt212 wrote: post #218

Diacritics mostly just add a layer of unnecessary complexity, and make it hard for computers to handle. Given the above, I'm surprised Esperanto was designed using accent marks. But I suspect those weren't the most practical people.

Computers were not much of a concern in 1887. As Esperanto was designed to be a neutral language that took words from many (European) languages, it needed an orthography that would unambiguously denote those sounds. You can trivially transliterate the circumflex letter with digraphs using h anyway. ĝ -> gh Still perfectly readable. If you want a language where there is a trivial and unambiguous mapping between writte…

Digraphs can still unambiguously denote sounds, but Zamenhof really wanted the canonical spelling to have one character = one phoneme.

And, ironically, it was easier to do it back then compared to the computer age, because typewriters did something similar to Unicode combining marks - specifically, on the French typewriter, you'd have a single key for ^ which was used to overtype letters where circumflex was needed. And since French typewriters were very common in all countries Zamenhof used circumflex for his letters (except Ŭ, seemingly just because).

As far as digraphs, using "h" can be ambiguous in some cases, which is why Esperanto digraphs are more often written using "x" these days when diacritics aren't available for some reason. I actually quite like that scheme for several reasons. The obvious one is that "x" is then strictly a modifier letter with no sound value of its own, like hard/soft sign in Cyrillic, so all digraphs are unambiguous. But also, there's a matching diacritical mark, "combining X above". So we could e.g. say that "cx" and "c̽" are the same thing, and you use the latter when possible falling back to the former when you need ASCII.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#486

Post by tracker1 »

palmfacehn wrote: post #392
wmgries wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The one that gets me, as an American is nuclear vs nucular. Both have been in use verbally and written for decades... academics have adopted the former, even if the latter was more common in most early use. And that's just one, pretty recent example.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#487

Post by int_19h »

tracker1 wrote: post #484
int_19h wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diacritics don't need to be used the way they are in French, i.e. to preserve the original spelling. On the contrary, most languages use them to make their spelling more phonetic. Nor is there a need for some insane kind of diacritics to handle English. Its phonemic inventory is considerable, yes, but it can be easily organized, especially when you keep in mind that many distinct sounds are allophones (and thus don't…

Now try to get close to a billion people around the world with already varied cultures to follow the "new" rules of their native language.

I'm well aware that any kind of English spelling reform is non-viable for backwards compatibility reasons.

But that is a different argument from saying that English can't use diacritic-based orthography because the phonemic inventory is too complex.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#488

Post by mbonnet »

dfawcus wrote: post #422
eesmith wrote: post #115

Earlier 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.

And yet only in non-American printed English.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#489

Post by [deleted] »

bvrmn wrote: post #406
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.

blood

[deleted]

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#490

Post by [deleted] »

pif wrote: post #337
thechao wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're trying to to argue something like: "the set of dialects that make up English have a large(r?) set of allowable IPA orthographic representations than the accepted set of English orthographies" or something to that effect? And, that, perhaps, Spanish (French? Ukrainian?) have a much smaller set of alternate IPA orthographies for a given acceptable orthography? I guess I'm really confused. It's not like E…

> 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.

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