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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#531

Post by justahuman74 »

cpursley wrote: post #504
tracker1 wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What’s that have to do with how terrible the English writing system is? Why not just reform written English to read the same way it’s sounds? I’m maybe a B2 level Russian learner and can near perfectly pronounce almost any modern Russian writing because it’s written almost exactly the way it’s spoken. I assume it’s the same with many other languages.

Go to England and try to get even two small towns to agree on what the sounds are

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#532

Post by tshaddox »

sotix wrote: post #412
r00f wrote: post #303

I 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.

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.

> You can always tell someone who is well read in English when they mispronounce everything they say.

This is a very popular pro-reading sentiment. The trouble is that you can also read about how to pronounce words.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#533

Post by unethical_ban »

johnnyjeans wrote: post #312
r00f wrote: post #303

I 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.

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…

I'll just say that learning Serbian Cyrillic in two days and knowing instantly how to pronounce any word I read was amazing.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#534

Post by [deleted] »

cpursley wrote: post #504
tracker1 wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What’s that have to do with how terrible the English writing system is? Why not just reform written English to read the same way it’s sounds? I’m maybe a B2 level Russian learner and can near perfectly pronounce almost any modern Russian writing because it’s written almost exactly the way it’s spoken. I assume it’s the same with many other languages.

[deleted]

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#535

Post by jjav »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #283
dadoum wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to this paper [0] and my own experience, it's way easier to pronounce a word in French given the spelled word than in English. It's slightly harder to spell French than English for the model of the study, but it's really close. Now, in my personal experience, I feel like French has a lot of rules while English has a lot of outliers which do not follow any rules. But my native language is French, so I am obv…

Yeah as far as I know, in French words are always pronounced consistent with how they're spelled. The same is not true in English. Americans complain a lot about french spellings '-ioux', 'eau', etc. but they offer no gripe over the difference between '-ough' in 'enough' vs 'through'. French is funny to me because the written language and the spoken language are in some ways quite different, with written french intro…

> Yeah as far as I know, in French words are always pronounced consistent with how they're spelled.

Whoa, very much not! I have spent the last 20 years trying to learn how to pronounce french words (my partner is a native french speaker, so I keep trying). The only somewhat consistent pattern I have is that the last few letters of each word are often silent, but even that is not really always consistent.

I'm fluent in 4 languages but french is an impossibly tough nut to crack for me.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#536

Post by renox »

From the article

>> The use of diacritics arises out of a mismatch between an alphabet and the language it’s being used to write: if an alphabet were well adapted to a language, it would have letters for all the language’s sounds. and then it use 'ç' as an example even though French has 's' for the same sound, amusing.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#537

Post by jjav »

int_19h wrote: post #457
foobarian wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

South Slavic languages have 1-1 mappings thanks to an engineer in disguise [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karad%C5%BEi%C4%87#Linguis...

It's really not that hard. Some other examples of the same include Belarusian (albeit with Cyrillic alphabet) and Finnish.

Finnish is extremely easy, there is one sound for each letter and zero exceptions.

Spanish is also very predictable. While there are a few exceptions (like 'c' can be 'c' or 's'), they are very easy rules to follow, so never any surprises.

English and French are in the batshit crazy category. It's pretty much all random, you just have to know from memorization.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#538

Post by jjav »

WalterBright wrote: post #297
jjav wrote: post #166

Earlier 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 would expect that spelling bees would select words that are not phonetically spelled. This selection bias does not imply that English does not have productive pronunciation rules.

True, in that spelling bees will select for harder words.

But the fact that such words exist, in such large quantities that memorizing them all is so challenging that this becomes a competitive sport, is why engligh is so impossible.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#539

Post by huimang »

int_19h wrote: post #474
huimang wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All languages have inconsistencies, but it seems in vogue these days to single out english and use it as a punching bag. Furthermore, no natural human languages (i.e. not artificially constructed ones like esperanto) are logical. They all have irregularities and illogical aspects. It is not "beyond fucked" that things have different pronunciations sometimes. Other languages have problems for people who solely learn b…

English is singled out because its orthography really is atrociously bad even when compared with other languages. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.13321

Amongst niche circles of linguists, maybe. It's easy to single out for the average person because it's popular- english is a language learned around the entire world.

Besides, I'd rather have some more word pronunications than memorizing a table of der/das/die,dem/dem/der and a word's gender on top of learning the word itself. Or changing the position of a verb depending on if I used a modal verb or not.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#540

Post by williamdclt »

throaway5454 wrote: post #502
williamdclt wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, I'm not particularly advocating for making english a phonetic language. I'm just saying it being non-phonetic does cause issues (and makes it frustrating, but also shows a very interesting history). Assuming we wanted to make English a phonetic language, then your question is kind of moot: phonetic means we need to pick the pronunciation rules for phonemes, which would make other ways to pronounce these…

All those examples follow the linguistic patterns of the languages they come from. They aren't arbitrary, they just don't teach us the context when we're learning as children.

Of course there’s always reasons. Teaching it to children isn’t really a solution: you’d need to know where words come from before reading them correctly, and also many people don’t learn English as children.

Phonetic languages do borrow words from other languages too, they adapt them to their own language keeping the pronunciation (the only example coming to mind right now is the Czech for sandwich, sendvič). English could do that just fine being phonetic was a goal

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