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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#571

Post by throaway955 »

bluGill wrote: post #313
devilbunny wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s fairly good at helping us understand the etymology. Have a “y” acting as a vowel in the spelling? Good chance it’s Greek. Have a “k”? Almost certainly not Latin.

That is trivia that is useless in almost all contexts. I've been a native English speaker all my life and this is the first I've heard of that. I can't think of any situation in life where knowing that fact would have been helpful. Your claim seems reasonable, but if someone says you are wrong I wouldn't fact check it even if clear links were posted so that I could.

But if you had known it (aka, if anyone had taught it to you), it wouldn't be useless, as you would know the context and how to pronounce it...not to mention the meaning behind it

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#572

Post by throaway955 »

yeasku wrote: post #95
jcranmer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules [1], and trying to make 'fish' come out of ghoti requires breaking them. 'gh' only occurs as an /f/ sound when it occurs at the end of a syllable; as an initial consonant cluster, it's invariably /g/. Turning 'ti' to /ʃ/ is a fairly normal affricatization, which requires a subsequent vowel, which is lacking here (consider wo…

English is not a phonetic language and it also lacks accents. Saying it has pronunciartion rules it is an strech. You have conventions. In languages like spanish if you read a word, is very hard to misspronounce it.

no, for the millionth time, English has rules, NOT conventions, you just need to know the historical context behind the multiple rules.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#573

Post by throaway955 »

papichulo2023 wrote: post #54
jcranmer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules [1], and trying to make 'fish' come out of ghoti requires breaking them. 'gh' only occurs as an /f/ sound when it occurs at the end of a syllable; as an initial consonant cluster, it's invariably /g/. Turning 'ti' to /ʃ/ is a fairly normal affricatization, which requires a subsequent vowel, which is lacking here (consider wo…

As a non native, it still bothers me how "toward" is pronounced, "toord", really?

toward is pronounced exactly as its spelt in Canada

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#574

Post by throaway955 »

simondotau wrote: post #80
papichulo2023 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non native, it still bothers me how "toward" is pronounced, "toord", really?

If you think that’s crazy, consider that “English” is the only word in the English language that spells the /ɪŋ/ (‘ing’) sound as “eng”.

Angland - Eng-land - Ing-land

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#575

Post by tanjtanjtanj »

zahlman wrote: post #362
jcranmer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules [1], and trying to make 'fish' come out of ghoti requires breaking them. 'gh' only occurs as an /f/ sound when it occurs at the end of a syllable; as an initial consonant cluster, it's invariably /g/. Turning 'ti' to /ʃ/ is a fairly normal affricatization, which requires a subsequent vowel, which is lacking here (consider wo…

> Even turning the 'o' into /ɪ/ relies on fairly regular vowel destressing Isn't the "o" in "women" stressed?

It depends on your accent, within a couple steps of me I can find someone that pronounces it “Wimmen”, “Wuhmen”, or “Woemen”.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#576

Post by tiagod »

lucasoshiro wrote: post #555
HorseOfCourse wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Do men/man and bitch/beach sound the same to you? Not exactly the same, but I differentiate them more based on the context than in the pronunciation. Giving an example for Portuguese that has about the same difference: "roupa de lá" (clothes from there) and "roupa de lã" (wool clothes). If you write them in Google Translate or similar you'll see the difference, which is very subtle for non-Portuguese speakers but s…

Portuguese has a ton of such examples.

"O meu canto" can mean "My corner" and "My singing".

"Conselho" means "advice" and "Concelho" means "council".

"Aço" means steel, and "Asso" means "I roast".

All of these pairs sound exactly the same.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#577

Post by tanjtanjtanj »

jameshart wrote: post #516
beeforpork wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The -Ough in enough and tough and in borough and dough are pronounced the same, at least in any accent I can think of.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#578

Post by trealira »

cobbaut wrote: post #559
trealira wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet there's also girl, gift, gimp, gill, gibbon, and giggle.

But but but the creator himself said it is gif like in gin and giraffe... right? TIL: gimp is gimp and not gimp? I always pronounced this like gin.

> But but but the creator himself said it is gif like in gin and giraffe... right?

Yeah, that's what the creator said, and that's actually how I pronounce it, too. Just pointing out that "gi-" words can have both hard and soft Gs.

> TIL: gimp is gimp and not gimp? I always pronounced this like gin.

You learn something new every day!

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#579

Post by W3zzy »

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 have French as second and English as my third language. English comes easy and natural because we're saturated by the language. That's one of the reasons my children don't mispronounce English words as often as they do French words. Both languages are equally terrible. On the other hand a few weeks ago my daughter demonstrated a nearly perfect pronunciation of Italian while reading a text without understanding a word. Looks like the Italians got their shit straight. Apart from pistacchio. Nobody pronounces it pistacchio...

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#580

Post by david-gpu »

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? ;)

A simple rule of thumb suffices most of the time, and native speakers will still understand you when you get it wrong.

But yeah, I wish Spanish omitted genders most of the time like Japanese does. It complicates things and adds very little in exchange.

The real kick in the gonads is verb conjugations. Nearly every common verb is irregular and there are something like 18 tenses, times six subjects. Even many native speakers struggle to get them right.

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