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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#511

Post by asveikau »

tracker1 wrote: post #481
ASalazarMX wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it's a mistake to view that situation as unique to English.

Spain is still a multi lingual country with several local languages each of them centuries old. But even ignoring that and focusing only on Castilian, there were invasions by goths, who left behind words like ropa or guardar, and Arabic speakers, who left behind words like almacén.

Like English having both cow and beef, there are words with historical overlap but different etymologies and divergent meaning over time. For example almacén and bodega were both words for a warehouse.

There are also tons of words where Spanish had phonetically diverged from latin, but then the same word was re-imported from latin in "educated" use.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#512

Post by jameshart »

throaway5454 wrote: post #505
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.

Door and pool are pronounced the same where I am, with a drawn out double o sound. When spoken rapidly, the vowel contracts, especially in door.

The door vowel placed between P and L would make the word 'Paul' or 'pall' in most English accents. If I imagine 'door' with the pool vowel, I get something like a Scottish pronunciation of 'dour'.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#513

Post by WorldMaker »

throaway5454 wrote: post #501
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”

Draught beer is a linguistic holdout. I think many USA places list it as draft beer.

Does relate to the point that English still doesn't have a central linguistics authority (and likely won't ever). Just various reformers that have been more or less successful and in how distributed their reforms have been. Draught versus draft was indeed one of Noah Webster's proposed reforms that influenced a lot of American spellings and in turn is still influencing UK spellings. It's not as obvious as color versus colour, but there is a bit of US versus UK in draft versus draught.

(Webster also went on to suggest dawter over daughter, to remove more of these vestigial augh spellings, but that one still hasn't caught on even in the US. Just as the cot/caught split is its own weird remaining reform discussion.)

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#514

Post by athenot »

JdeBP wrote: post #500
pests wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a quick search it seems this was a Presidential Memorandum not an Executive Action. “Executive orders are generally more formal, require publication in the Federal Register, and must cite the President's legal authority, while memoranda are less formal, may not be published, and do not always require a justification of authority.” These sometimes get called executive orders, like some memos that trump has signed…

The 11110 thing is a myth, though. The closest that we get to that is that it is number 127 in the NARA's catalogue of the Johnson's public papers for 1968. * https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/PPP-1968-book1

Thank you for the correction.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#515

Post by baobun »

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…

On the other hand an "Noun Gender Bee" would probably be more interesting in Spanish than English? ;)

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#516

Post by jameshart »

beeforpork wrote: post #225
amelius wrote: post #12

English 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

Like others, I don't find that nonsense word particularly enlightening. But maybe compare '-ough' in: cough, tough, dough, through, plough.

You missed enough and borough

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#517

Post by WorldMaker »

trealira wrote: post #413
rrgok wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh thank god, someone said it. Who cares if "tree" is masculine or feminine, it does not give my any information. In Italian, tree is a masculine word: what can I do knowing "tree" is masculine?

Grammatical gender can serve as disambiguation. I just heard this sentence recently while watching something in Spanish: "No me compares con alguien como tú, que llegaste aquí de una isla oriental sólo porque te impresionó un espectáculo de magia barato." In the phrase "un espectáculo de magia barato," which means "cheap magic show" here, you can tell from the genders of the nouns and adjectives that it's that "barat…

It seems like we can invent better checksums and referents than grammatical gender. Arguably that's a fascinating part of the pronoun discussions in English, being one of the last remaining bastions of grammatical gender in English (that and familial relationship words). I don't expect us to invent better things at all quickly, but it seems worth trying and it is interesting seeing various experiments.

One of the things I liked in studying lojban (a conlang of interesting background) was the use of mathematical identifiers as pronouns and "math genders" more related to linguistic role, referents like "the first noun", "the third verb" as pronouns. Referring to things by number is particularly great either, but it was interesting seeing a different approach to it.

Similarly, I think the language with the best pronouns I've experienced is ASL (American Sign Language). Signed languages have the ability to use three dimensional space in ways to anchor references that are impractical in spoken languages but so useful in signed languages.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#518

Post by jgalt212 »

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…

> Computers were not much of a concern in 1887.

Obviously true, but typewriters were in common business use by then.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#519

Post by pessimizer »

brainwad wrote: post #188
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.

You don't even use them consistently in the same sentence (your unaccented i has at least 3 different values, for instance). The real reason English spelling is frozen in the 1600s is that that is the last time all English speakers had a common language community. Since the foundation of the colonies, Englishes have diverged from each other from that starting point, so that no reform can be neutral to all current Eng…

It's very important for English to have 9000 vowels so we can tell where you're from within about a five mile radius, no matter how hard you try to hide it.

If you mess up every vowel in an English sentence, everybody can understand every word, but it makes everybody a little upset and a little aggressive. If you want to play it safe, just make every vowel a schwa and people will think you're from New Zealand.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#520

Post by sotix »

hbn wrote: post #432
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.

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.

My Greek teacher had trouble with early and yearly
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