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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#541

Post by anthk »

gus_massa wrote: post #527
anthk wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, it's used, all over the whole country.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#542

Post by gabrielgio »

hbn wrote: post #424
csomar wrote: post #340

I sometimes wonder if English dominated programming and the Internet partly because it doesn't use accents or special characters. You have limited space on a keyboard, and as a native Arabic/French speaker, typing in those languages is a real hassle. French requires é, à, ç and other accents, while Arabic is even more complex with right-to-left text and changing letter forms. English just flows naturally. Maybe the I…

I think that's underselling the west's post-WW2 influence and the amount of innovation that was fueled by a booming capitalist society that the entire world wanted to take part in. I'd say English's simple, non-accented latin characters being easy to represent mathematically was a happy coincidence.

> booming capitalist society that the entire world wanted to take part in.

You can't be that naive. Not every country wanted and a lot of them were forced into.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#543

Post by Thorrez »

dinfinity wrote: post #368
palmfacehn wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The confusion may come from the various spelling conventions in the numerous loan words. In many of the counterintuitive cases, you could imagine a more phonetic spelling. The tradition has been to preserve buffet as is, instead of rewriting it as, "buffay". The distinction is there. English can be used phonetically. We prefer to preserve the heritage of various loan words instead.

Eh. Only sometimes . Hearing Americans pronounce the French loanword 'niche' as 'nitch' instead of 'neesh' is cringe-inducing. English pronunciation is just kind of a mess (especially in the US). It is one of the few languages where highly educated mature people are regularly unsure of how to pronounce a word in their own language or where there is no agreed upon 'non-dialect'/standard pronunciation.

>It is one of the few languages where highly educated mature people are regularly unsure of how to pronounce a word in their own language

Which is worse, being unable to correctly pronounce a word (but still being close enough to be understandable) or being completely unable to write a word?

https://globalchinapulse.net/character-amnesia-in-china/

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#544

Post by gwd »

int_19h wrote: post #470
gwd wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 aspi…

> Languages usually have either the voiced/unvoiced distinction as phonemic, or the aspirated/unaspirated distinction.

Yes, that makes sense -- I certainly learned something from this conversation. It makes sense that speakers would naturally tend to classify things along different lines, and in Chinese the aspirated / unaspirated classification makes sense.

That said, after having had some time to sit with the proposition that 'j' in the English name "Joe" is voiced, and the "zh" in Chinese word "zhou" is unvoiced, it continues to seem obviously false to me. It seems very much to me like mistaking of the map for the territory [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#545

Post by saagarjha »

baobun wrote: post #515
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…

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

Sure, but saying the word would often give it away.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#546

Post by vintermann »

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…

You don't have to make a perfect pronunciation system. It's OK if a vowel is pronounced slightly differently, as long as its pronunciation can be predicted from context. Even if it can only be predicted 99% of the time.

Insisting that the writing system captures every little distinction is a common mistake enterprising linguists do (often when designing an alphabet for a bible translation, or "modernizing" the spelling of a language which is not their own). They don't have to. Even if you do it, it won't last long. Letters only have to be a reasonably consistent shorthand for how things are pronounced. People don't like a ton of markers or, god forbid, digits sprinkled into their writing to specify a detailed pronunciation.

English has accumulated inconsistencies for so long, though, that it can't really be said to be consistent anymore. Usually, there are radicals who just cut through and start writing more sensibly here and there (without digits or quirky phonetical markers), cutting down on the worst excesses of inconsistency. But in English, these radicals have been soundly defeated in prestige by conservative writers.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#547

Post by coffeeling »

teleforce wrote: post #32
catlikesshrimp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese doesn't use accents, but the characters are extremely complicated in comparison. The chacters are both the images and the specific strokes which draw the image. Spoken Chinese has at least five tones (1,2,3,4,5 Number five stands for neutral) but to native speakers there is much nuance. I won't explain the reason of its popularity. Someone braver than I may do it. Grammar is very simple, by the way

Chinese is hard in unnecessary way both in language speaking and writing. I've got the impression that they make in unnecessary hard so only certain people can operate the language and work in government or I call it the elite mentality. I've got the same impression about complex programming languages for examples C++ and Rust. The languages are so complex that you cannot even make the compiler fast [1]. Spoken manda…

As much as I approve of shitting on Chinese characters, a lot of the arguments about literacy don't really apply in the modern age. Back in the 1400s when Sejong and his ministers published the Hun'ming'jeong'eun, sure, but in the modern day literacy is pretty much driven by the modern schooling system and even Japan achieves high literacy rates. It's a bunch of unnecessary extra work, but it's not an impediment to being able to read if that work is put in.

It is true that in 1400s Korea being able to read was a sign of status, and the literati argued against making it easier to preserve their station. The same applied to postwar Japan according to J. Marshall Unger.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#548

Post by coffeeling »

OneMorePerson wrote: post #20
catlikesshrimp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese doesn't use accents, but the characters are extremely complicated in comparison. The chacters are both the images and the specific strokes which draw the image. Spoken Chinese has at least five tones (1,2,3,4,5 Number five stands for neutral) but to native speakers there is much nuance. I won't explain the reason of its popularity. Someone braver than I may do it. Grammar is very simple, by the way

Given the meaning of "accent" given in the article Chinese seems like a very accented language (saying that as a Mandarin speaker). Aren't Chinese tones the very definition of an accented language? (as defined by the article, accent is a broad term)

The article is talking about diacritics, ie. turning e to é and so on. Even by that standard, though, pinyin uses diacritics to mark tone.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#549

Post by HorseOfCourse »

lucasoshiro wrote: post #327
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.

> excessive writing marks In English I need to find how each word is pronounced individually. What the hell is the difference between "men" and "man"? What's the difference between "bitch" and "beach"? Why "though" sounds closer to "throw" than "through" or "thought"? Those differences are encoded in a unclear way that there are more exceptions than rules. Portuguese (my native language) is not perfect in that sense,…

Do men/man and bitch/beach sound the same to you? I am kinda confused here, these words have distinct meanings and sounds.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#550

Post by thefringthing »

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.

The article touches on this, but there have been countless attempts to restandardize English spelling or replace the Latin alphabet with one more suited to English. But English is a global language with no central authority responsible for deciding what is correct, making coordinated change nearly impossible.

To my mind, the best such attempt was Kingsley Read's, made at the behest of G. B. Shaw: https://www.shavian.info

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