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Why English doesn't use accents

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Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#591

Post by trueismywork »

W3zzy wrote: post #579
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 wo…

Pronunciation to be honest is the least important thing in languages today. Being able to type within mobile and keyboardd is probably the most important.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#592

Post by trueismywork »

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #493
Aardwolf wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also agree, you can already use combinations of multiple characters to define other sounds, and that's faster to type too Shame, though, that in English the sounds that combinations of characters make, aren't well or uniquely defined (e.g. bird, word, hurt, heard, herd, ... all sound like the same vowel)

They're faster to type largely because your keyboard is English. Other languages (French, German, etc) have diacritics right there. Even Japanese isn't that much harder to type once you actually learn it (and, on fact, is quite pleasant on a smartphone even at beginner level). On the topic of similar word sounds, this is a big thing that hangs up English speakers on romantic languages. Their vowels are sloppy and con…

But that's the point, each language has its own diacritics. There can never be a standard set..

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#593

Post by trueismywork »

williamdclt wrote: post #328
johnnyjeans wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The "non-phonetic alphabet" is the biggest non-issue I see people raise a stink about Myself and many friends who aren’t native have struggled with speaking fluently because of it. Most of us still mispronounce some words (my friend pronounced “draught beer” like the lack of rain, instead of like draft). Doesn’t mean things should change, but it’s certainly not a “non-issue”

Pronunciation is not mandated to be correct or wrong, as long as you're within a radius, it's good. Pronunciation has changed in languages before enmasse. Look at big vowel.shift

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#594

Post by trueismywork »

alephnerd wrote: post #382
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…

A much more simpler answer is the fact that much of the tech and ecosystem for computers was developed and commercialized in the US. If Silicon Valley was in France, we'd all be using AZERTY and Minitel.

And that would have failed. Because rest of world doesn't use accents. Remember that first typewriters were actually german but English ones have succeeded.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#595

Post by california-og »

eesmith wrote: post #229
california-og wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And long s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s AFAIK it was dropped out because the top hook of the long s punch broke easily, and could be easily replaced with a basic s.

Your link says ſ (the long s) didn't disappear (from English) until several hundred years after the movable type printing press and makes no mention of physical problems when using that letter, suggesting instead removal gave a type a more modern feel: > Pioneer of type design John Bell (1746–1831), who started the British Letter Foundry in 1788, is often "credited with the demise of the long s".[12] Paul W. Nash con…

It's more of a pet theory I have. The 1787 Printer's grammar mentions the following:

"Kerned Letters being attended with more trouble than other Sorts, Founders are sometimes sparing in casting them; whereas they rather require a larger number than their Casting-Bill specifies; considering the chance which Kerned Letters stand, to have their Beaks broke, especially the Roman f, when it stands at the end of a line, where it is exposed to other accidents, besides those from the lye-brush: but in still more danger are Kerned Letters of the Italic; especially d f l, when they stand, with their Beaks unguarded, at the end of lines; and at the beginning of lines, f g j [long s] y run a great hazard; though of these, f and [long s] in particular are most liable to suffer."[0]

So, foundries are less likely to cast letters that break easily. This is just 4 years before Bell dropped the long s, so while the other reasons outlined in the Wikipedia are probably the main reasons, I speculate that it was also an economic decision based on them breaking quite easily. Especially when the new "modern" look required ever sharper and finer details.

And my point was that it is (partly) this material aspect of typography that contributed to the disappearance of a whole letter from English written language. Doesn't really matter if it's hundreds of years after the "invention" of printing press, it's still related to it.

0: https://archive.org/details/b2876058x/page/41/mode/1up

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#596

Post by california-og »

california-og wrote: post #595
eesmith wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your link says ſ (the long s) didn't disappear (from English) until several hundred years after the movable type printing press and makes no mention of physical problems when using that letter, suggesting instead removal gave a type a more modern feel: > Pioneer of type design John Bell (1746–1831), who started the British Letter Foundry in 1788, is often "credited with the demise of the long s".[12] Paul W. Nash con…

It's more of a pet theory I have. The 1787 Printer's grammar mentions the following: "Kerned Letters being attended with more trouble than other Sorts, Founders are sometimes sparing in casting them; whereas they rather require a larger number than their Casting-Bill specifies; considering the chance which Kerned Letters stand, to have their Beaks broke, especially the Roman f, when it stands at the end of a line, wh…

For more, read Paul Nash's "The abandoning of the long s in Britain in 1800", which mentions the material and economic aspects, but then digs deeper into why it happened so suddenly in 1800 (which he speculates is realted to the Act).

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#597

Post by eesmith »

california-og wrote: post #595
eesmith wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your link says ſ (the long s) didn't disappear (from English) until several hundred years after the movable type printing press and makes no mention of physical problems when using that letter, suggesting instead removal gave a type a more modern feel: > Pioneer of type design John Bell (1746–1831), who started the British Letter Foundry in 1788, is often "credited with the demise of the long s".[12] Paul W. Nash con…

It's more of a pet theory I have. The 1787 Printer's grammar mentions the following: "Kerned Letters being attended with more trouble than other Sorts, Founders are sometimes sparing in casting them; whereas they rather require a larger number than their Casting-Bill specifies; considering the chance which Kerned Letters stand, to have their Beaks broke, especially the Roman f, when it stands at the end of a line, wh…

Related to, perhaps, but not so relevant as my comment was in response to mousethatroared writing 'As I understand it, English lost a lot of characters when the movable type printing press was created.'

Also, the long s is not a letter of the English alphabet but rather a form of the letter 's', like how ꝛ (the r rotunda) is an archaic variant form of the letter 'r'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_rotunda

Similar, I believe, to how Greek σ when in the word-final position is ς, but both are lower-case sigma.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#598

Post by epiccoleman »

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.

Totally! I once heard (I think it was in an AvE video) that you shouldn't make fun of someone for wrong pronunciation - it just means they encountered the word in text first - i.e. autodidactically.

I remember a few funny examples of this from my own youth - I didn't know that "dachshund" and what I was hearing as "doxen" were the same thing. I was pronouncing it as "dash-hund" (only realizing after someone pointed this out that it's spelled "dachs - hund" and that the pronunciation makes at least "German sense".)

Also I remember talking about the Led Zeppelin song "D'yer Maker" to someone and pronouncing it like some kind of "fantasy name" - like "Die-er Mah-ker". Only to be told what should have been obvious enough from the music: It's pronounced "Jamaica".

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#599

Post by paulcapewell »

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.

And as a British speaker of English it amuses me that we say "fillit" steak when Americans (afaik) correctly say "fillay". There are others, but I guess there are more 'correct' British English pronunciations of words with origins like this than there are American English.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#600

Post by sotix »

epiccoleman wrote: post #598
sotix wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Totally! I once heard (I think it was in an AvE video) that you shouldn't make fun of someone for wrong pronunciation - it just means they encountered the word in text first - i.e. autodidactically. I remember a few funny examples of this from my own youth - I didn't know that "dachshund" and what I was hearing as "d…

Well both of your words just blew my mind!
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