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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#521

Post by germandiago »

School-Cotton wrote: post #311
germandiago wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it is perfectly reasonable to talk about spanish from Spsin the same you talk about English from England. After all, it is where they come from originally and have their own spelling (colour vs color, etc.) An x in standard spanish has always been the two sounds I told you and that mexican deviation is specific to Mexico. Yes, it is over 100 million speakers but I was still assuming the root language in its…

I get your point, but FWIW, México is not a Mexican deviation; it's just an older Spanish spelling. E.g. Jiménez was once spelled Ximénez and there are probably lots of other examples. The "root language spoken in its original place" absolutely did pronounce X like modern J.

True, I forgot that detail. Ximenez did exist in fact and I forgot that. So it must be that.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#522

Post by germandiago »

RiverCrochet wrote: post #387
gwd wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My son's first year teacher said (I may have the numbers slightly wrong) that Spanish has 23 phonemes (sounds the mouth makes) and 23 graphemes (ways to write sounds). English, on the other hand, has 43 phonemes and over 500 graphemes.

Spanish "maps" very nicely but even Spanish isn't exactly 1:1 - /k/ can be written both c and qu, and k where it occasionally appears in the language (e.g. kilo) - and the u in qu is silent. - /s/ can be written c, s, and z, though stress rules are different for c and z. - r and rr are distinct sounds but r = rr at the beginning of words, I think. - At least in Mexican Spanish: The "ua" sound can be spelled ua or oa…

qu: the u is always silent and qu is followed by i or e. It is still a systematic way of reading. It is like gue and gui, you pronounce as in "singer" the "ge", the u is mute. If you want to pronounce the u, as in pingüino, you set the diaeresis.

The stress rules, to the best of my knowledge, is very systemaic (not 100% but I would say "almost" at least for the words in use). Even the stress rules are very uniform.

> r and rr are distinct sounds but r = rr at the beginning of words, I think.

This is still systematic reading. At the start of a word it is the strong one, yes. And when it is preceded by a consonant, such as in "enredar" (that is strong r). There is no exception of any kind here.

> d has a sound a little like English voiced-th at the end of words (e.g. juventud)

That is some dialects in some areas. We pronounce a clean d at the end in my area (around Valencia). It is also the correct, standard way to do it for spanish. The other is a deviation existing in León, for example.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#523

Post by johnisgood »

coffeeling wrote: post #425
johnisgood wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

French is not a good example. Pronunciation often deviates from spelling in French (e.g. many silent letters and inconsistent mappings). Hungarian, however, is pronounced the way it is written, as its orthographic type is phonemic, whereas French and English are of type deep orthography. Serbian is of the perfectly phonemic type. "Write as you speak, read as it is written" is a common saying.

The silent letters are not the point - that's why the poster you replied to said it doesn't work speech->writing in French. But writing->speech is much, much more consistent than in English, even if the orthography itself is kinda criminal with all the silent letters and whatnot.

I am inclined to agree.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#524

Post by gottorf »

cm2187 wrote: post #291
ralferoo wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

French also has some weird gotchas, e.g. "la démocratie" where the spelling represents the word's root rather than pronunciation.

An even worse example is the last name "de Broglie", which I think most French natives would likely get wrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k45IZDkg2Pg

Not nearly as bad as the English pronouncing, say, the name Cholmondeley :-)

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#525

Post by OJFord »

GianFabien wrote: post #495
OJFord wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you mean misspelled

"mispelt" is a somewhat archaic British spelling. "mispelled" is more modern .

No it isn't. -t instead of -ed in general for many words is dialectal for one thing, more commonly retained (a Saxonism) in the West Country than elsewhere. Misspelled in particular though is distinctly American, everywhere in Britain uses misspelt.

(Ironically, I'm not sure if deliberately ironically, you 'mispelt' both, fwiw.)

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#526

Post by int_19h »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #497
int_19h wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aspi…

> But then you get Hindi with a four-way distinction, both voiced/unvoiced and aspirated/unaspirated in all possible combinations. They're spelled that way; I don't think they're supposed to be pronounced that way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant#Voiced_con... >> True aspirated voiced consonants, as opposed to murmured (breathy-voice) consonants such as the [bʱ], [dʱ], [ɡʱ] that are common among the…

> They're spelled that way; I don't think they're supposed to be pronounced that way.

True, but most languages don't distinguish between [h] and [ɦ] to begin with, with one often the allophone of the other. So listening to Hindi it sounds like the same thing, more or less.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#527

Post by gus_massa »

anthk wrote: post #399
gus_massa wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example for a small car ("auto") you say and write: In Argentina: "autito" In Colombia: "autico" In Spain: "autillo" the same rule applies for all words, not only for cars.

In Spain you'll listen the three cases at once and all of them are perfectly valid. -ito it's almost the universal way everywhere in the Hispanic world. -ico it's widely used in the South of Navarre and Aragón and everyone will understand you. Heck, it's the diminutive from used by the hick people, and thus, it's uber known, altough you might look like a bumfuck village redneck sheepherd with a beret by using -ico ou…

In Argentina everyone will understand you, but if you don't use "ito" then people may ask where are you from.

"ico" is used in many countries of Central America and Caribe. I asked someone from Colombia, so I'm sure about Colombia but I'm no sure about every other country.

Is "illo" used in Madrid? I think I heard it in movies or TV programs from Spain.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#528

Post by wredcoll »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #132
wredcoll wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?!

Who called them "english characters"? Pinyin uses s in a very common way, z in the way of Italian, and c more or less in the manner of various Slavic languages. They are a sequence of related sounds: s is the fricative, z is affricated, and c is both affricated and aspirated. Sh, zh, and ch are a sequence of sounds related to s, z, and c. Sh is a fricative articulated farther back in the mouth, zh is its affricated f…

Well that is a good point. For some reason I just assumed that pinyin was specific to english and that other languages used different transliteration schemes.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#529

Post by throaway955 »

jameshart wrote: post #512
throaway5454 wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

dew-r pew-l

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#530

Post by wqaatwt »

bcatanzaro wrote: post #358
pif wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

There is a still a lot more linguistic diversity in Italy than across the entire English speaking world.

e.g. Northern Italian languages are technically more closely related to Gallo-Romance languages from the other side of the Alps than to standard Italian.

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