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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#561

Post by dinfinity »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #557
dinfinity wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

...we all agree that the right pronunciation of "nitch" is "neesh", though, or at least I've never heard a serious argument to the contrary. People just genuinely don't know how to pronounce it because they've only seen it written. One that still gets me personally is "hyperbole"--I know how it's pronounced but when I read it, I still say "hyper-bowl" in my head more often than not. I don't think I've ever made the m…

> I've never heard a serious argument to the contrary.

Well, here you go: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/niche#did-you-kno...

> I still say "hyper-bowl" in my head more often than not.

Same. This is where diacritics would fix the problem: Hyperbolé. Although hyperbolee would also work, of course.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#562

Post by LoveMortuus »

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.

It always makes me sad when a language's alphabet is different from their phonetic alphabet because it means that unless you hear how the word is pronounced there's basically no way of know how to pronounce it. Right now I'm learning Portuguese Portuguese and it just makes me so sad that it legit pushed me away from learning the language.

They pronounce 's' at the end on the word the same as how they pronounce 'x' and many many more such examples, basically no word is pronounced the way it's written.

My native language is Slovenian, the way you say the letters in the alphabet is how you pronounce them in 99% of the words and even if you miss-pronounce the 1%, the words are usually so close that people still understand you.

It just really made me appreciate my language even though it has many other things that just makes it difficult to the point that most of my writings are in English, were I don't really need to think about all the rules and can just focus on telling the story.

I'm of the opinion that all languages should use their phonetic alphabet as their alphabet, that way, once you've learned the (phonetical) alphabet you would know how to pronounce all the words. (Unlike in Portuguese where milk is written as 'leite' but it's pronounced very similarly to the word 'light' in English. (not to mention the Brazilian Portuguese)).

And to the Spanish people, your language is just slightly more aligned than Portuguese, but nowhere near as clear as I would like it to be.

I agree with the parent, Greek is much easier to pronounce, at least when compared to Spanish and Portuguese, though though the emphasis of the words not always being at the front of the word can make things a bit difficult, I'm looking at you κοτόπουλο (chicken).

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#563

Post by wink »

serial_dev wrote: post #450
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.

I also wouldn’t go as far as saying that it’s a shame that English does not use diacritics, on the other hand, I also wouldn’t say that diacritics make a language more difficult. Learning how to use them in Spanish and German takes about an afternoon, and when it comes to learning languages, that’s a negligible amount of time.

Not exactly sure what you mean (in German) but just learning about them and using them correctly are 2 completely different things.

I mean, you could maybe ignore the use of going a -> ä for plural forms, I would argue that learning all these words are part of it.

I'm not saying it's hugely complicated but I've seen enough people struggle with it.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#564

Post by wink »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #409
zahlman wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because something is complete nonsense, doesn't mean it can't be enjoyable.

I think English makes a lot of sense, but only if you invest the time to learn some of its etymology. Knowing some Latin, German, and Greek roots (in that order) is immensely helpful. You don't have to learn those languages per se, just some of the vocab. Eventually, you can look at a word, know if it's Latin/French, Germanic, or Greek in origin and all the spelling rules make much more sense. This takes a lot of tim…

You can also have a (maybe wrong) sense of familiarity that feels like it makes sense.

I'm ESL but after so many years of daily contact I find writing stuff in English easier than in my native German. Never lived anywhere else. I'm not claiming it's free of errors but it just feels like less work.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#566

Post by throaway955 »

MarceColl wrote: post #235
decimalenough wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spanish is better than English, but it's nowhere near that regular. There are three different ways to pronounce "x", wild dialectal variations in "ll" and "c", etc.

The rules are very clear on when those are used though, you are not really arguing the original point imo. What are the dialectical variations in "ll" and "c"?

as has been stated many times in this thread, the rules are also very clear in English. They just aren't taught.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#567

Post by [deleted] »

germandiago wrote: post #285
School-Cotton wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since less than 10% of Spanish speakers are from Spain, there’s no reason to assume you were specifically talking about that one country when referring to the Spanish language in general. And anyway, as you point out, even in Spain the form México is accepted now.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#568

Post by throaway955 »

aeonik wrote: post #241
woleium wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as i understand it, english is actually 3-5 other languages in a trench coat.

At least 3: ~26% Germanic ~29% Latin ~29% French ~16% Other RobWords covers this really well: https://youtu.be/PCE4C9GvqI0?si=4Wd6NFus4v1YqmC3

Almost all the most used words in English are Germanic. Latin in particular is overrpresented because of scientific and technical terms which are rarely used.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#569

Post by throaway955 »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #459
germandiago wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the problems in english (not the only one, but one of them) is that for the vowels there are 5 graphs (is this term correct? Sorry but hope it is understandable) but many more sounds. In Spanish there are 5 vowels in the latin alphabet and exactly five sounds and nothing else. Valencian has 7 sounds though, two for e and two for o. Similarly, Catalan also (and in some circumstances the o sounds as u, when the…

Yeah but we represent a lot of vowel sounds by combining vowels - 5 letters (not including y), if we allow any combo of two to represent a different sound that's 25 combos, and if we remember that preceding and following consonants can modify vowels too (though, dough, caught bought vs thou, bao, sour, or; on, con, Ron vs how, cow, ow) that's quite a lot of combos. Now, you can (and should!) accuse me of cherry-picki…

Yes, English is VERY consistent. The problem is that there are multiple systems working inside English vocabulary, so you have to get familiar with more than one rule set.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#570

Post by tuetuopay »

gavinward wrote: post #498
asielen wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the fun thing about English. There isn't really a single right way to speak or write it. It is defined by common usage. As long as your audience understands you, it is correct. As someone else pointed out, loan words often have accents. At what point does jalapeño become en english word? There is no other english word to refer to the pepper, therefore it is now an english word and therefore english words can…

I find it interesting that the Spanish consider the ñ to be a separate letter, in their 27 letter alphabet.

The double l "ll" is also a separate letter and is pronounced the same as y in "eye"
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