Why English doesn't use accents

https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/why-english-doesnt-use-accents

by sandbach • 1 year ago

350 578 1 year ago

Clearly the early scribes were looking forward to the 7-bit ASCII code and needed to reduce the number of characters that were represented.

bawolff• 1 year ago

If you go early enough, my understanding is that people would write accents in ascii by doing:

e <backspace character> '

Which was called "overstriking".

PyWoody• 1 year ago

If you go back even further, you get the iota subscript [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iota_subscript

kps2• 1 year ago

Yes, this was explicitly called out in the ASCII standard, and is the reason ASCII has ~ (in place of the proposed ‾) and ‘^’ (which replaced the ‘↑’ in the original 1963 version).

int_19h25• 1 year ago

This comes from typewriters. Curiously, the reason why Esperanto uses Ĉ, Ĝ, Ĥ, Ĵ, and Ŝ is because the circumflex was present on French typewriters (which were very common in Europe at the time). Even though French itself only uses it for Â, Ê, Û - since it was a distinct key used for overtyping, it could be repurposed in this manner, just like Unicode combining marks today.

mousethatroared5• 1 year ago

You're not wrong, except the technological reason. As I understand it, English lost a lot of characters when the movable type printing press was created.

eesmith11• 1 year ago

Only þ (thorn) died with the printing of Caxton's Bible using y-, for cost reasons.

The other letters -- ƿ (wynn), æ (ash), and ð (eth) -- went out of use long before movable type printing. https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/the-lost-letters-of-th...

KurSix5• 1 year ago

All hail the first software engineers of the scriptorium

bravesoul22• 1 year ago

But they added extra letters to words to make up for lack of number of letters. They'd be fans of utf-8 maybe.

Dwedit• 1 year ago

Diacritics aren't unambiguous, there are different conventions for using them. What sound does "ā" make? It depends.

Affric• 1 year ago

If what it depends on is the language then thats trivial.

dijit6• 1 year ago

Why is it trivial?

The ä and a sounds in Swedish and Finnish are swapped; and they're direct neighbours (with compulsory education for Swedish in Finland, no less).

TacticalCoder• 1 year ago

Many native english speaker here like to fantasize on the superiority of other cultures / languages but what good are diacritics for when there are still a shitload of letters that have no diacritics and can be pronounced in different ways?

For example let's take french... A cat is a "chat" but you don't pronounced the 't'. Oh but in "chatte" (pussycat or pussy), you pronounce the t's. While in other words in french you pronounced the 't', like in "table" (yup, it means a table btw).

Speaking of which, the 'e' in "le chat" isn't pronounced the same as the mostly (but not entirely) silent 'e' in "table".

No diacritics on these 'e' here and yet they've got different pronunciations.

Don't come and say: "but that's only with silent letters". Definitely not. "elle" (she) and "le" (the)... Different pronunciation for these three e's.

I've got better: "les fils" (the sons) vs "les fils" (the cables). Exact same spelling. But in one you pronounce the 's', in the other you don't.

Wait, even better: "le fils" (the son) vs "les fils" (the sons). Same pronunciation for "fils", no plural or singular: just one word with a 's' at the end.

Stop romanticizing about french: it probably has more exceptions and weirdness than english.

And you probably don't want to get me started on the average reading and writing skills in elementary and secondary schools in France. It's in freefall so the whole point is kinda moot: the digital natives can't use diacritics properly in french. Heck, many can't even (and don't want to) speak proper french. The language is becoming simpler and simpler, dumber and dumber.

Source: I'm a native french speaker.

shiroiuma2• 1 year ago

Many native english speaker here like to fantasize on the superiority of other cultures / languages

Some languages really are a lot better than English as far as mapping between spellings and pronunciations. French just isn't one of them; as you pointed out, it's possibly even worse.

I point to German as the superior European language in this regard. I learned some in high school. I can't speak conversationally any more, but I know the pronunciation rules, so if I can read it, I can say it and pronounce it well enough for a German speaker to understand me, even though I don't understand it myself.

That said, German is a nightmare compared to English because of the grammatical complexity (cases etc.), but for pronunciation in relation to spelling, it's excellent. The written form really does reflect the spoken form accurately.

jraph5• 1 year ago

it probably has more exceptions and weirdness than english.

Pronunciation-wise, I doubt it. All your examples have English counterparts.

Consider eleven (the vowel sounds for the same letter), psychology (silent p), wind / rewind, many irregular verbs (like read, read, read), Wednesday and business (many letters are just not/weirdly pronounced), history and litterature (one fewer syllable than expected), the complex rules to pronounce the ed + exceptions... You basically have to know how an English word is pronounced to pronounce it correctly. Guessing works but only so far, and I believe less than for French (and I'm a French speaker too).

I have a close friend from the US who likes to make fun of the French language, but when I cite English, he says oh yeah, but for English we already know that! :-)

Anyway, English and French are both quite bad at this, and you are right, that's nothing to be proud about. It's just a reality we have to deal with.

The language is becoming simpler and simpler, dumber and dumber.

Simpler is not dumber and I absolutely don't think the language is becoming dumber. The last reform (1990) brings more regularity and this is most welcome, freeing us time for things that actually matter, making the language more accessible to foreigners as well as people with conditions like dyslexia or dysorthography and less a status tool. I welcome the French language becoming more welcoming.

Or please strongly back your dumber and dumber statement. Because usually that's just baseless, tired rambling from clueless conservative people saying such things. A French speciality (a national sport even, championed by the Figaro?).

And you probably don't want to get me started on the average reading and writing skills in elementary and secondary schools in France. It's in freefall

That too. Maybe you should fix your English before lamenting on the writing skills of people, because you are making a lot of basic language mistakes in this very comment in which you are doing this. That's harsh and not nice, but that's what you are seemingly doing to others and I want to take the opportunity to make you feel what it may feel like. Actually, you probably cannot even begin to imagine how you may sound like to people for whom writing is a struggle. Such people often feel ashamed because of people like you. Let's just be forgiving, tolerant, more empathetic and stop using language skills as status and start focusing on the content.

I have a close acquaintance who expresses themself perfectly, only writing without mistakes is hard for them. They even have an official disability recognition for their strong dyslexia (so they can have a related tool on their workstation). Let's just cut people some slack on their writing skills (which are in the vast majority not related to laziness - or maybe you are suggesting people are dumber and dumber?) and the world will be a better place.

See also [1] for a nuanced discussion on "Writing skills are lower and lower". It turns out it's partly due to more people going to school and not only the elite, which is a good thing, including children whose first language is not French and whose life in general may likely be a bit more complicated than the one of a random privileged French child (like I was).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8SJ6v2A0qU&t=120 (in French)

toast0• 1 year ago

I love French. Institutionalized mumbling.

You might not hear the t in chat, but you need to know it's there to pronounce it properly. And especially if there's a vowel starting the next word.

zorked• 1 year ago

The problem with French is that pronounciation changed but not ortography. It's easy to see that you did pronounce chaT in the past. Other languages periodically review their ortography. My language had that twice in my lifetime.

zajio1am2• 1 year ago

Stop romanticizing about french: it probably has more exceptions and weirdness than english.

As a non-native to both French and English who was taught both languages at school, there is a difference that french pronunciation rules were taught from the beginning, while english pronunciation was taught just as IPA transcription of dictionary words.

willyt• 1 year ago

I’ve been learning french and for the most part once you learn that you just start but don’t finish saying the last letter of any word and you understand which letters you don’t pronounce on the end of the verb that change between je/il/elle/on (usually the last one) and ils/elles (usually the last 3) it’s not that hard. To test my pronunciation I can read a french word I’ve never heard before and have a pretty good chance that the apple speech recognition in notes will get it or conversly I can hear it and have a good chance of spelling it correctly. By contrast I am a native British English speaker, I have two postgraduate degrees, I can read the ‘dearest creature in creation’ poem perfectly and still there are words I would avoid saying in a professional or academic context for fear of saying them wrong and looking ignorant. And good luck pronouncing the name of any UK town or village correctly. What is hard about french is remembering if something is masculine or feminine.

andy99• 1 year ago

I have a theory that English is popular because pronunciation encodes almost no information so it works well regardless of accent. Some asian languages, and even French, heavily depend on tone for understanding so are tougher for non-native speakers to communicate in. Butchered English can still be generally understood, thus it's position as lingua franca.

boredatoms• 1 year ago

English is currently popular because money is always popular

dijit6• 1 year ago

This elides a lot of history, despite being glib it's mostly correct.

If English wasn't as easy to learn as it is, it would have been destroyed though.

The absolute selling point of English is the fact that since it has no proper rules it's the "glue" of European languages, it's the bash of human linguistics.

Ugly, crude, nearly impossible to master if you're not using it daily and all it really does is pin together superior languages that actually have formal rules, but could never be as flexible as "common".

Yes, it enjoyed tremendous success due to the british empire, and continues to dominate thanks to the hollywood propaganda machine - and it owes about 90% of it's success to that. But it's important to note that last 10% is important too, and that is because English is an easy language to learn and it is able to evolve rapidly.

catlikesshrimp• 1 year ago

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

OneMorePerson2• 1 year ago

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)

teleforce4• 1 year ago

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 mandarin has 5 tones but the original ancient Chinese is similar to Cantonese and it has 7 tones. The modern Chinese writing characters is considered simplified because in Taiwan they use the original and more complex Chinese characters.

Fun facts King Sejong of Korea actually get rid of the cumbersome Chinese characters for writing Korean languages and introduced new Korean characters Hangul in 15th CE [2[. It's reported Korean literacy rate skyrocketed in a very short time because it's much easier and suited the Korean language better. Another fun facts, Korean characters can be learnt overnight but you need to memorize and understand several thousands of Chinese characters just to read and understand the newspaper headlines in Chinese. I have a Chinese friend who has Chinese mother tongue and is a well accomplished senior engineer but he cannot even read Chinese newspapers since he did not has a formal education in Chinese writing system.

As Einstein famously remark you should make it simple but not simpler.

[1] Why is the Rust compiler so slow? (425 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44390488

[2] Hangul:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul

ayende• 1 year ago

French was the lingua franca for a very long time (pun intended)

jonathanlb• 1 year ago

Former linguistics major here. Interestingly, 'lingua franca' originally referred to a specific pidgin trade language spoken in the Mediterranean. The 'franca' part referred to the Franks, who were originally a Germanic tribe that established kingdoms in what is now France and much of western Europe. By the late Byzantine period, 'Franks' had become a blanket term for all Western Europeans. What happened to both 'Franks' and eventually to 'lingua franca' is an example of semantic broadening.

OneMorePerson2• 1 year ago

Is it the case that it encodes no information, or is it the case that the information is somehow..."optional"? I know I selectively ignore unintentionally snarky or sarcastic tones from non native English speakers. Even the simple example of turning "ok" into "oook" can be used to imply someone is being unreasonable.

mk_stjames• 1 year ago

Another way of saying this is that spoken English has a lot of inbuilt, inherent error correct-ability, ala a very large minimum Hamming distance between spoken words/phrases.

I always found French to be very much the opposite in spoken form, due to the 'consonnes finales muettes' and liaison and élision, along with the large amount of homonyms and general colloquialism used in everyday speech. Yet in written form, it is nearly as straightforward as English, as you get back those damn letters that aren't being spoken.

kergonath4• 1 year ago

I always found French to be very much the opposite in spoken form, due to the 'consonnes finales muettes' and liaison and élision, along with the large amount of homonyms and general colloquialism used in everyday speech.

It is not that different from English in that respect. I found both to be quite difficult compared to e.g. German, which is very regular, or Spanish (which is annoying grammar-wise but straightforward to pronounce).

Spoken English is full of elisions and silent letters, and also full of locale-dependent colloquialisms that take some time getting used to. I remember struggling for a while living in New York and London despite having a decent level in “standard” English. I still occasionally struggle with my mates from Ireland and Yorkshire. After living more than a decade in English-speaking countries I accepted that I will never be able to pronounce correctly a word I never heard before.

Missing liaisons is not problematic when you speak French. It marks you as a non-native but it does not make you harder to understand. They can be often omitted by natives as well, depending on the accent.

teleforce4• 1 year ago

Fun facts almost one third (1/3) of English language vocabulary are similar to French. To be exact most of the professional and legal version of the English words are taken from French. Hence if you understand English, you can read short notice or announcement in French, and understand them mostly. But if you have people spoken the same notice and announcement in French version to you without you reading it, most probably you won't understand most of the same sentences.

gwervc• 1 year ago

Plus there is another 1/3 coming from Latin which French speakers has no issue understanding either. English is basically akin to a dumbed down pidgin of French (exponentially less verb conjugation, no gender agreement, less pronouns with the thou/you merge, less articles and annoying small words, etc.) starting over a Germanic core.

shagie2• 1 year ago

During the Norman Conquest, England was ruled by the French... and that is when those words entered the language.

Also from that time was many culinary words. The word for the meat in English is the word for the animal in French (the word for the animal in English is likely germanic in origin). That was in part because the when the French speaking nobility wanted boef (French for cow), they didn't want a cow (German Kuh) - they wanted the meat of a cow. So English got beef. Pork? French asked for porc, but didn't want a swine.

milliams• 1 year ago

While ~29% of the dictionary words come from French, in any written or spoken sentence the number falls dramatically. All the small joining words we use and the core of our grammar is Germanic.

See Rob Word's "Is English really a Germanic language?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCE4C9GvqI0

paulmooreparks3• 1 year ago

Singlish says, "Hi." It's fascinating to watch that in action here in Singapore, as I find Singlish to be a compact and efficient form of English that greedily borrows words from Mandarin, Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew, Malay, Tamil, and a few other languages to enable rich communication among the various cultures, ethnicities, and language groups found here. It even borrows the grammatical structures of some of those languages, and yet the meaning still gets through. It didn't take me long to get comfortable with it, and it helped me appreciate the promiscuous nature of English even more.

KurSix5• 1 year ago

But I think its global dominance has more to do with historical and economic factors than linguistic flexibility

porphyra2• 1 year ago

The Economist magazine uses a diæresis (two dots) in words like “coöperate” and “reëlect” to indicate that both vowels are pronounced separately, rather than as a diphthong. This is considered old-school and uncommon though.

SnooSux• 1 year ago

Unless The Economist does it as well, you were probably thinking of The New Yorker.

https://www.arrantpedantry.com/2020/03/24/umlauts-diaereses-...

porphyra2• 1 year ago

Oops I think you are right. My parents subscribed to both and I must have mixed them up.

nlawalker• 1 year ago

Learning the relationship between a diæresis and a diphthong and then seeing that the word diæresis contains a diphthong has rounded out my day nicely, thanks for that.

schoen• 1 year ago

I enjoyed learning recently that the most common diacritics in Czech are the háček and the čárka. The word "háček" has a čárka followed by a háček, while the word "čárka" has a háček followed by by a čárka!

duskwuff• 1 year ago

Similarly, a grave accent is sometimes used in poetry to indicate that a single vowel is voiced - e.g. in "cursèd" to indicate that the word should be pronounced as two syllables "curse-ed", rather than a single syllable "curst".

Loanwords often retain their accents as well: cliché, façade, doppelgänger, jalapeño.

madcaptenor2• 1 year ago

But it's habanero, not habañero - people mistakenly put the ñ by analogy with jalapeño.

o11c4• 1 year ago

The adjective "learnèd" (meaning "well-educated") is a native English word that should take the grave accent even outside of poetry. Also "unlearnèd".

robin_reala• 1 year ago

There’s also the (dying) use of diareses to indicate vowel stress, for example coöperative or naïve.

eadmund• 1 year ago

I’ve always seen it written with an acute accent: ‘curséd.’ Wikipedia notes both usages, but to my knowledge I have never once read a poem which used a grave accent that way.

ww520• 1 year ago

Used to just be a dash, like re-elect. Cooperate was co-operate. People got tired of writing dashes and they got shortened.

nicoburns2• 1 year ago

That seems like a quirk of the magazine for thsie pstticular words, but its more common for some others like "naïve" and "Zoë", although that's gone out of fashion somewhat since computers took over (and I believe both of those are loan words in english)

racingmars• 1 year ago

I don't remember ever seeing that in The Economist.

I think you're thinking of New Yorker magazine, perhaps?

asielen• 1 year ago

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 have diacritics.

The closest thing we have to a source of truth for the english language is the OED. It isn't prescriptive, it just lists how words are used rather than how words should be used.

Jalapeño is in the OED with the tilde https://www.oed.com/dictionary/jalapeno_n?tab=factsheet#1253...

dkdbejwi3832• 1 year ago

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.

That's how all languages work - to the chagrin of l'Académie Française - English is no special exception.

brabel• 1 year ago

I see naïve as an example of diacritics in English as well.

gavinward2• 1 year ago

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

CamouflagedKiwi• 1 year ago

Oh interesting, I've never seen those cases. I'd say it's more common (although maybe still a little old-school?) to use it in words like Noël or Chloë.

int_19h25• 1 year ago

The difference is whether the sequence of vowels crosses the morpheme boundary or not. When it does, as in "cooperate", it's usually readily obvious to native speakers even when seeing the word for the first time, thus they don't need a mark to disambiguate.

ykonstant• 1 year ago

I love this, because I always do a double take and start pronouncing it as coOUUUperate and REEEElect, giving me much entertainment (I am easily entertained!).

Edit: also see rôle, which invokes this classic: https://i.redd.it/qrfr7o4ue2z51.jpg

cadamsdotcom• 1 year ago

Fascinating. I had wrote that off as a bug in their CMS.

bloak• 1 year ago

The Economist uses diacritics in French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish words, but deletes the diacritics from other languages (or maybe they keep them when they happen to resemble diacritics from those languages). I think I once saw a letter from a Hungarian complaining about that: a word they'd used meant something silly or obscene after they'd removed the diacritic.

devnullbrain• 1 year ago

Most publications are haphazard like this. The diacritic example also applies to Vietnamese, despite the alphabet coming from Portuguese.

Similarly, Chinese and Korean names are usually written in the order they are pronounced, while Japanese names are reversed.

amelius• 1 year ago

English doesn't use accents because the speakers don't give a __ about the correspondence between the written form and the pronunciation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

knome• 1 year ago

ghoti is a ridiculous example. it takes its components entirely out of context. 'gh' as 'f' only occurs at the end of a syllable, 'ti' as 'sh' only exists as part of '-tion' where the pronunciation slurred over time. Pretending it says anything about the nature of the English language outside of English being a complex merging of various other languages that has evolved with time is silly.

salomonk_mur• 1 year ago

Read and read are the same exact fucking letters and are pronounced differently. You really don't need to go very far to find many examples.

English is fucked up. The only way to learn how to speak it properly is by memorization.

Other languages like Spanish or Korean keep a near-perfect one to one correspondence between written form and expected pronunciation.

jcranmer3• 1 year ago

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 words like 'ratio', 'gracious', or 'nation'). Even turning the 'o' into /ɪ/ relies on fairly regular vowel destressing, which there's no reason to expect in 'ghoti'--which should be pronounced per English rules, pretty unambiguously, like goatee.

There are some real issues with English spelling, like the inconsistency of pronouncing 'ea' as /i/ or /ɛ/ (consider, uh, read and read). But 'ghoti' isn't one of them, because that's a case where there's not a lot of ambiguity in English pronunciation.

[1] The worst offenders in English pronunciation are when English borrows foreign words both with foreign pronunciations and foreign spellings.

degun• 1 year ago

The explanation you gave is already contained in the cited Wikipedia article. I think this "ghoti" example is more of a tongue-in-cheek mocking of pronunciation inconsistencies. If you want a jarring example, consider laughter and slaughter. I know, i know, they have different origins, but still, it confuses foreigners like me while learning the language.

papichulo2023• 1 year ago

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

germandiago11• 1 year ago

As a spanish I could say the most challenging part of english is the lack of consistency between how you write something and how you pronounce it.

Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it.

English is a bit messy regarding to this, for whatever reasons.

wredcoll2• 1 year ago

I want to know who thought that chinese transliterated into "english characters" should use a whole bunch of q, x and zs to represent sounds in a way that no other english word does.

Why is Zhou pronounced that way?!

yeasku• 1 year ago

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.

thaumasiotes7• 1 year ago

Turning 'ti' to /ʃ/ is a fairly normal affricatization

It can't be an affrication, because /ʃ/ is not an affricate. (Although /tj/ is affricated, as /tʃ/ [think "gotcha"] - when you say 'ti', you're referring to words that were pronounced with /s/ rather than /t/.)

Wouldn't /sj/ -> /ʃ/ usually just be called "palatalization"?

(The specific phenomenon in the context of English appears to be called "yod-coalescence".)

jjav5• 1 year ago

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. The fact that hearing a word being spoken is challenging enough to figure out how it is written that it is a competitive sport, says it all.

There are many languages where the concept of a spelling bee competition makes no sense at all, because as soon as you hear the word being spoken, it is 100% deterministically obvious how it is written. English, not so much.

But, french is much worse!

goalieca• 1 year ago

English is a particularly challenging language to spell with. How many languages have a national spelling competition?

taeric9• 1 year ago

It has become a thing where folks are taught, basically, that English is not a phonetic language. It is truly mind boggling the number of college educated folks I've talked with that start to try and argue that we don't have a phonetic alphabet.

And, like, I get it. We don't have a fully regular one. But this is like the people that think we don't have a single word to describe some things, when they have to basically ignore adjectives and many many synonyms to get to that idea.

Even better when folks complain that we have different ways to refer to people from other nations. Ignoring that a large part of that is that we heavily deferred to how said people wanted to be referred to.

coffeeling6• 1 year ago

Agreed, a far better critique of English spelling:

https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/cha...

DiogenesKynikos2• 1 year ago

You're correct on the reasons why "ghoti" cannot be pronounced like "fish," but what your explanation illustrates is that the mapping from English spelling to pronunciation is extremely nuanced - needlessly so.

A more direct phonetic writing system, like many other languages have, would make it much easier to learn how to read and write English.

zahlman5• 1 year ago

Even turning the 'o' into /ɪ/ relies on fairly regular vowel destressing

Isn't the "o" in "women" stressed?

eesmith11• 1 year ago

I thought the article did a good job of explaining how English uses additional letters where French use accents, like the "h" in "ship" to indicate how the s is pronounced.

6P58r3MXJSLi4• 1 year ago

that's how "sh" is pronounced, not how "s" is pronounced

same pronunciation of sh in ship is found in

- sugar

- sure

- machine

- Chicago

- mustache

- sheikh

- nation (!!!!)

Can you notice that some of those words do not have any "s" in them?

English doesn't make any sense.

KurSix5• 1 year ago

To be honest, English orthography is such a Frankenstein's monster of historical layers that even if we did care, untangling it would be a nightmare

beeforpork• 1 year ago

Like others, I don't find that nonsense word particularly enlightening.

But maybe compare '-ough' in: cough, tough, dough, through, plough.

jameshart3• 1 year ago

You missed enough and borough

wizardforhire2• 1 year ago

Yep! Not only that but people will actively mispronounce words as a form of vetting. Mispronunciations also becoming a form of tribal identity. Speaking of American vs proper English. America is the most diverse cultural landscape in human history. If you stay put, you won’t see it. Start traveling around the country and its the only thing you see.

this is not hyperbole. Sure other places are diverse, however because of the unique nature of the US and its size it just ends up attracting and subsequently absorbing.

DiogenesKynikos2• 1 year ago

America is diverse in some ways, but in terms of language and dialects (which is what we're discussing here), America is remarkably homogeneous. There are many tiny countries with more linguistic diversity than the US.

tempodox• 1 year ago

Indeed, you could never tell how an English word is pronounced unless you “just know”. And then it's still inconsistent (e.g. finite / infinite).

brainwad3• 1 year ago

Most English words are regular, and most commonly used ones too. "the", "be", "are", "why", "can", "might", "life", etc. are all perfectly regular if you understand how to read english orthography (which uses character clusters and can't be read a letter at a time).

Infinite/finite regularly related, too - the reason the pronunciation of the finite cluster changes is due to stress differences (initial in- always takes the stress, and then the following syllable must be destressed). Note that the long vowel at the end comes back in the 4 syllable "infinitum", again due to regular stress rules.

OJFord3• 1 year ago

It does sometimes, though its use may mark the author as among the agèd.

Not to mention loanwords, which of course English is full of, and are sometimes considered properly spelt with their original accents, though many will spell them naïvely without.

Diphthongs too, especially in British English, are not just an archæological find, though out of pragmatism usually written digitally with two separate characters.

JumpCrisscross• 1 year ago

though its use may mark the author as among the agèd

Thirtysomething here. I use diaeresis (a/k/a diæresis) over e.g. coöperate. It’s more concise than a hyphen. And it makes more sense than cooperate, given cooper is a word.

krige• 1 year ago

Thirtysomething here too. I see a diaeresis in naïve often enough to remember that it happens yet uncommon enough to be taken by surprise anyway.

GianFabien2• 1 year ago

On the internet the most marked issue is the difference between British English spellings (England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and the USA. It is frustrating that on most spell checked text boxes words like: harbour, labour, actualise, etc shown as misspelt.

I find it most irksome that the Australian Labor Party has chosen the USA spelling in spite of being part of the Commonwealth.

OJFord3• 1 year ago

Did you mean misspelled

danbolt• 1 year ago

After enough programming over the years, I feel like my mind has separated the concept of a colour (which I learned as a child) and `Color` data.

paulmooreparks3• 1 year ago

The great thing about using Singapore as my locale is that it accepts pretty much any English spelling you throw at it, British or American. You see quite a mix of both on signs and documents here, too.

goodcanadian• 1 year ago

It gets worse. Canadian is different to both British and American (or it has some of each) and Australian is different again from all three.

KurSix5• 1 year ago

So we can use them if you're feeling fancy or writing for The New Yorker

eahm4• 1 year ago

French.. you people have no idea how Italy is.

I speak differently than my brothers because I grew up at my grandparents 3 MILES! away and if I go to my family restaurant 2 MILES the other direction there is a different accent again, and I mean different words too not just the sound. Where I used to go to school 10 miles away they don't understand if I speak my dialect because it's a different region.

The whole Italy is like that, a different dialect every 2-3 miles, every family, town, city, province, county and region has different accents and ways to make food and recipes. My town is 3200 years old, older than the Romans, they used to fight, then ally then fight again with them etc., this dialect thing is very old, cultures, traditions and families.

Of course we have the Italian language in common and the main dialects are separated by the main city of the region then by the region itself but yep, that's how it is.

mousethatroared5• 1 year ago

And it's great.

My HS Italian teacher's university thesis was on the different dialects within Naples and their various (ancient) Greek origins.

megablast• 1 year ago

mean different words too not just the sound. Where I used to go to school 10 miles away they don't understand if I speak my dialect because it's a different region.

Like what? You have to give us examples.

eahm4• 1 year ago

Oh geez, for example in Italian to say here you say "qui", where I grew up I say "mchi" but my brothers say "mqui" or "mque", where I used to go to school they say "meque" with the weirdest sound.

To say what are you doing in Italian is "cosa fai" but I say "co fei" and my brothers "sa fei" and where I used to go to school they say "che fe".

These are just simple simple things but almost everything changes here and there and I can't put the sound with the words here, they actually sound different, and change where the actual accents are.

tacker2000• 1 year ago

This article is about accents on letters (diacritics), not accents as in dialects.

I found your post interesting neverthelesss.

Luker883• 1 year ago

It is probably connected.

Having so many different dialects (and full minor languages!) saying the same word slightly differently, Italians were forced to find (and use) a way to put the correct accent in writing.

Other languages probably don't have the mind boggling number of dialects Italy has. GP was not exaggerating, it really changes every few kilometers.

Like the article says: "situations like these are surprisingly few in English"

eesmith11• 1 year ago

In 6th grade, so back in 1982, I read the French SF novel "Malevil".

I was astounded (speaking as a US kid here), to learn that French people born and raised in France didn't natively speak French, but instead learned their regional language.

Here is an example, from https://archive.org/details/malevilmerl00merl/page/150/mode/... :

And besides, Thomas was already quite isolated enough as it was: by his youth, by his city origins, by his cast of thought, by his character, and by his ignorance of our patois. I had to ask La Menou and Peyssou not to overdo the use of their first language — since neither of them had learned much French till they went to school — because at mealtimes, if they began a conversation in patois, then everyone else, little by little, would begin to drop into patois too, and after a while Thomas was made to feel a stranger in our life.

Two minutes ago I learned that "patois" has a distinct meaning in France: "patois refers to any sociolect associated with uneducated rural classes, in contrast with the dominant prestige language (Standard French)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patois

I am very ill-informed on the history of the topic, including the national language policies of France and Italy. I do know that Sardinian is not a dialect of Italian, but my knowledge isn't much deeper than that. ;)

ValentinPearce• 1 year ago

IIRC in the early 1900s, coercive methods were used to stop children speaking their native regional languages, a lot of it in school.

In my region of Brittany (France) the most famous example that was on posters detailing good manners would say : "Il est interdit de parler breton et de cracher par terre" meaning "It's forbidden to speak Breton and to spit on the ground", placing both on the same level.

rkomorn4• 1 year ago

I was astounded (speaking as a US kid here), to learn that French people born and raised in France didn't natively speak French, but instead learned their regional language.

As a French person born before 1982, I find this sentence questionable.

If you mean "there were some people who learned a local dialect", then sure, you could dig some up.

If you mean "many regions had dialects that were learned before French", then I believe you misunderstood (or were misled).

Finding anyone who even spoke a regional dialect would've been a novelty, let alone one who grew up speaking it before French.

bookofjoe• 1 year ago

See also: Jamaican Patois aka speakyspoke

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaican_Patois

yawboakye• 1 year ago

it remains true to this day. gascon[0] is still spoken in south of france, by both young and old. i know because i've heard it spoken. the idea that the french speak french, italians italian, is very modern. european nations weren't as properly integrated as modern history will have us believe. iirc the integration sped up post-ww2. cf seeing like a state[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gascon_dialect

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

qsort• 1 year ago

Well, that's because they're really languages and not dialects! They all derive from Latin, there is no "old Italian" or anything, at some point we decided the Florentine "dialect", having the most literary prestige, would be standard Italian.

Italians only really started speaking Italian in their day-to-day life after the war. It was mostly a written/literary language before that.

Luker883• 1 year ago

Yes, surprisingly few Italian dialects are actually Italian derivatives (maybe only a couple?)

But there are differences between a dialect and a language, we can't say all of those are languages even if most come from Latin.

Italian wikipedia says that officially in Italy there are about 13 recognized languages (not counting Italian, plus French and Slovenian in some parts), and about a dozen main dialects.

In wikipedia you will notice 3 big dialect groups that are just that, groups of many, many dialects that do not qualify as languages.

It's more a difference of how recognized by the community those are, and how unified by grammar, locality and uniqueness. Kind of a gray area for many.

lou1306• 1 year ago

Well, that's because they're really languages and not dialects!

Indeed they are not strictly dialects of Italian, which followed its own evolution alongside them. I think most of them could still be explained as dialects of Latin, who underwent major "niche differentiation" in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Rome and the rise of barbaric kingdoms.

[Italian] was mostly a written/literary language before that.

This is a bit of an exaggeration. Clearly, even before the early modern era "Italians" could understand each other. Dante (from Florence) lived in Genoa and Ravenna, and had no need for an interpreter from what we can gather. Ditto the many "Renaissance men" who toured around Italy (Leonardo: Florence->Milan; Raphael and Michelangelo: Florence->Rome; Galileo:Pisa->Padua). This level of interconnection becomes really hard to explain without a high degree of mutual intelligibility.

paul_h• 1 year ago

England has small accent shifts every 25 mins (the other audible accent / http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7843058.stm) - the situation you describe is two communication orders more complicated than that!

jen729w• 1 year ago

Closer than that in some places. I'm from Sunderland, which is contiguous with Gateshead, and then Newcastle. I can clearly hear when someone is from Sunderland vs. Newcastle, although 'a foreigner' - say, someone from London - might not be able to pick it.

I dare say Liverpudlians and Mancunians and Glaswegians and so on would make the same claim.

internet_points• 1 year ago

Similarly in Norway and Sweden, new dialects every few miles, with both pronounciation and word changes. Places that could reach each other by boat tend to have more similar dialects (while if there's a mountain in the way you can have a bigger difference, though flight distance is shorter)

kome• 1 year ago

you clearly haven't read the article... they are talking about diacritics (accents) and not inflection of the spoken language.

i find absolutely worrisome that nobody is reading the articles anymore, and they just read the title.

it makes the quality of the discussion very very low.

huhkerrf• 1 year ago

From the site guidelines:

Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that"

Personally, the parent comment added a lot more, even inadvertantly, than one complaining about whether someone has or has not read the article.

Cthulhu_• 1 year ago

I grew up in the province of Friesland [0], which is part of the Frisia cultural region, an area that was not occupied by the Romans back when so it retained some of its identity and culture - although a lot of that was erased by Christian missionaries and subsequent invasions and government takeovers etc etc etc.

Anyway, super local accent changes are a thing there as well, go north a few kilometers from where I grew up and you go from the "woods" to the "clay", which has its own intonation and possibly words. Then there were town specific stereotypes - people from this town will knife you, that town is full of inbreds, etc. That's probably a lot of made-up intentional drama though, lol.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friesland

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisia

jjav5• 1 year ago

Interesting. I know that as a spanish speaker, there are some Italians whom I understand almost perfectly (like 90% and I can fill in the other 10% from context), but there are other Italians speakers where I can't understand anything at all.

patrick41638265• 1 year ago

Same in some parts of Germany. In the area where I grew up in you can tell in which village a person is from just by the way they talk, and the villages are just ~3 km apart!

From what I know this is because it was a relatively remote, dangerous and poor region (all by the standards of hundred years back) which changed ownership a lot (between clergy, bavaria, prussia) and people were mostly left to themselves

IAmBroom2• 1 year ago

'Ennery 'Iggins, is that you?

morganf• 1 year ago

It doesn't compare to that coolness you just shared, but I'm from Long Island (right outside New York City) and I and everyone from my childhood town can differentiate a Long Island accent from a New Jersey accent (very similar but subtly different; a suburb on the other side of NYC) from a Queens accent (a type of NY accent from a NY neighborhood, whose most famous exemplar is The Nanny) from a Brooklyn accent (another type of NY accent, the Mel Brooks sort and how my dad speaks), etc etc. So, while, the US is nothing like Italy where every 3 miles there's a different language-or-dialect, the US accent isn't nearly as uniform as one might think, for even within cities and their suburbs, like my hometown in the above example, there is a comparable dynamic, where going not-that-far (these neighborhoods and suburbs aren't far from each other) people speak in accents that are notably different to locals, although surely people not from NY group it all together as "the NY accent" without differentiating the level-of-nasal-ness and other such contributing factors to the accent.

umanwizard11• 1 year ago

Sadly those Brooklyn and Queens accents are becoming rare in large parts of Brooklyn and Queens. You really have to go out to areas with few transplants (Long Island, Staten Island, or rapidly shrinking white working class parts of Bk/Queens) to hear the typical NYC-area accents being used as the main variety of the majority of the community.

EbNar• 1 year ago

Italian here... Are you from the south of Italy, by any chance? Because I'm from there and it's exactly how you describe it.

eahm4• 1 year ago

Yeah, from near Urbino but moved to USA ~20 years ago.

pmichaud• 1 year ago

When I was doing a bunch of learning about linguistics, situations like this were very interesting and confusing to me. I still don't have a good working intuition for how this is possible. I don't understand what maintains the sound differences in the face of the continuous exposure to substantially different accents. It's empirically possible, but it's never made sense to me. Why don't you and your brothers end up talking the same after a while?

umanwizard11• 1 year ago

I mean, people do end up talking the same after a while. Regional differences are disappearing and being leveled all over the world due to the influence of centralized education systems and media.

BobaFloutist2• 1 year ago

You think that's bad, visit your friends to the East in Slovenia. You'd think they're doing it on purpose! How do so few people in such a small area make so many variations in the "same" language?

int_19h25• 1 year ago

Generally speaking, countries that have a lot of different ethnic groups and/or introduced universal education relatively late tend to be those with more diverse dialects. Think about it: in a world without newspapers and TV, where most people live their entire lives in the same village they have been born in, and relatively few travelers, any linguistic innovation that appears in one place is going to take a very long time to travel elsewhere. Thus, local dialects tend to diverge. Universal school education slows this down by introducing a standard literary language (and, historically, often in a very forcible way). Mass media, TV especially, leads to further homogenization.

every• 1 year ago

Fascinating site...

KurSix5• 1 year ago

The Godwin vignette at the beginning is such a clever way to dramatize what would otherwise be a dry spelling shift. Also, I never realized the irony that English avoids diacritics because of French influence

demetrius3• 1 year ago

to dramatize what would otherwise be a dry spelling shift

I don't think that's how it was developed, though. I really doubt there are real-world cases where cwen was scrubbed and queen written above it (correct me if I'm wrong!).

I think it’s more like “people stopped writing English for time being, only learned to write Norman and Latin, so when they needed to write a word or two, they’s use the spelling they knew. Eventually, this spelling because the way of writing English”.

I don’t think a situation with Godwin is plausible.

I never realized the irony that English avoids diacritics because of French influence

I'm not sure that's the best way to put it. Old English also generally didn’t use diacritics (modern texts add them: we’d use cwēn instead of cƿen, but these are modern invention).

So, English didn't use diacritics before Normans, and Normans didn't change this.

gwd8• 1 year ago

Also, I never realized the irony that English avoids diacritics because of French influence

But is that why they avoid diacritics? It sounds like English probably wouldn't have had diacritics even if the Normans hadn't come in.

Seeing my son try to learn to read things like "cycle", I feel like diacritics would make English writing a lot more accessible.

sfg• 1 year ago

According to the article, Norman influence led to double letters being used to better mark out sounds, which achieves the same as diacritics. It made English mostly good enough (failures like 'lead' are rare). Being good enough, and lacking a strong central authority, the language only accepted a conservative standardisation, and avoided larger changes such as including diacritics. Without these Norman changes, there is more chance diacritics would have been added, as it would not have been 'good enough'.

Written English is a worse is better story. The Norman influenced version being the first-mover that users cling to even when better comes along.

t-3• 1 year ago

Diacritics wouldn't have helped moderns if they were in from the beginning - most of the confusing words used to be pronounced like they are spelled (at least to people of the time). Maybe they would have helped to petrify pronunciations and slowed or stopped linguistic drift but I somewhat doubt that given historical literacy rates.

bravesoul22• 1 year ago

Tldr. 1066 French didn't have them. Later on that each language French / English independently solved the "need more letters" problem. English adds them e.g. "th" is 2 letters for a sound. French uses diacritics.

beepboop4000• 1 year ago

We are polite and it is considered racist.

dvh• 1 year ago

Ai blív ingliš šud imbreis diakritiks, ounli daunsaid ai sí is it wud spel dí end of speling bí kompetišns. Pun intendid.

cenamus• 1 year ago

Czech diacritics taking over the world :-)

int_19h25• 1 year ago

You'd be surprised! I actually see a fair amount of haceks hereabouts in PNW because they are used in the orthography of the local Salish Native American languages, so you end up with road signs like these: https://www.charkoosta.com/news/salish-language-stop-signs-e...

brainwad3• 1 year ago

You don't even use them consistently in the same sentence (your unaccented i has at least 3 different values, for instance).

The real reason English spelling is frozen in the 1600s is that that is the last time all English speakers had a common language community. Since the foundation of the colonies, Englishes have diverged from each other from that starting point, so that no reform can be neutral to all current Englishes - some have merged what was distinct in early modern English (e.g. cot-caught merger); while in other cases what was a single class has been split (e.g. the bath-trap split). Wikipedia has a (non-comprehensive) table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_correspondences_between_...; note for example that even where two varieties have merged phonemes, they might have merged them differently (compare Southern American to Australian). You might try to come up with a spelling system that covers all possible combinations, but it would be then very hard for the speakers who have mergers (i.e. all of them) to use - how is an Australian supposed to know which äː vowels are æ in American and which are ɑ? How are the Americans supposed to know which ɑ's are äː vs ɒ in Australia? etc. etc.

pessimizer2• 1 year ago

It's very important for English to have 9000 vowels so we can tell where you're from within about a five mile radius, no matter how hard you try to hide it.

If you mess up every vowel in an English sentence, everybody can understand every word, but it makes everybody a little upset and a little aggressive. If you want to play it safe, just make every vowel a schwa and people will think you're from New Zealand.

mgaunard2• 1 year ago

French barely has diacritics.

kergonath4• 1 year ago

There aren’t that many different diacritics, but every other word has one. Just look at any text in French, it’s full of é, è, ê, and à.

mgaunard2• 1 year ago

There are also â, ô, ù.

But still, it's nothing compared to other languages.

Tepix• 1 year ago

You mean Umlauts?

richrichardsson2• 1 year ago

This is why English has combinations like sh, th, ee, oo, ou that each make only a single sound.

Struggling with the th and ou here as only making a single sound.

Through and rough, both not the same ou as sound.

That and Thames, but this might be becaues Thames is proper noun?

The only thing I like about Croatian is that there is none of this nonsense. If you understand the letters and how to pronounce them, you can read a word and pronounce it correctly. In English there are so many words that you would have no idea the correct pronunciation until you've heard a native speaker say it. Even that's no guarantee it will be correct though!

whstl• 1 year ago

Correct. It's "one sound" represented by two letters, but not always the same sound in different words.

richrichardsson2• 1 year ago

Ah, I misunderstood "one sound" as meaning, "these letters only ever produce one sound that is unchanging regardless the word".

petesergeant• 1 year ago

As a (sort of) Englishman, it's a strange feeling reading about the Normans (or Vikings!) as "they", when in fact it's now "us":

Then the smile vanishes. There are no more English queens or kings. Only Normans.

Fun fact: due to pedigree collapse, if you have white British ancestors, you most likely have a direct linear connection to every Viking, Norman, and peasant who still has living descendents today. William the Conqueror is your great(great, etc) grandfather, as is Cnut the Great, Kenneth MacAlpin, and Rhodri the Great, etc etc.

namenotrequired• 1 year ago

It’s funny, how people identify can diverge a lot from genetic reality. Even e.g. Brazilians, who are mostly descendent of Europeans, will always say “we were colonised”

jgalt2122• 1 year ago

Diacritics mostly just add a layer of unnecessary complexity, and make it hard for computers to handle.

Given the above, I'm surprised Esperanto was designed using accent marks. But I suspect those weren't the most practical people.

cardanome• 1 year ago

Computers were not much of a concern in 1887.

As Esperanto was designed to be a neutral language that took words from many (European) languages, it needed an orthography that would unambiguously denote those sounds.

You can trivially transliterate the circumflex letter with digraphs using h anyway. ĝ -> gh

Still perfectly readable.

If you want a language where there is a trivial and unambiguous mapping between written and spoken language and the sounds don't exist in basic latin script, you need to do something. You can use diacritics, you can use digraphs and other tricks or well you just give up. But saying they are "unnecessary complexity" is very mistaken.

int_19h25• 1 year ago

Digraphs can still unambiguously denote sounds, but Zamenhof really wanted the canonical spelling to have one character = one phoneme.

And, ironically, it was easier to do it back then compared to the computer age, because typewriters did something similar to Unicode combining marks - specifically, on the French typewriter, you'd have a single key for ^ which was used to overtype letters where circumflex was needed. And since French typewriters were very common in all countries Zamenhof used circumflex for his letters (except Ŭ, seemingly just because).

As far as digraphs, using "h" can be ambiguous in some cases, which is why Esperanto digraphs are more often written using "x" these days when diacritics aren't available for some reason. I actually quite like that scheme for several reasons. The obvious one is that "x" is then strictly a modifier letter with no sound value of its own, like hard/soft sign in Cyrillic, so all digraphs are unambiguous. But also, there's a matching diacritical mark, "combining X above". So we could e.g. say that "cx" and "c̽" are the same thing, and you use the latter when possible falling back to the former when you need ASCII.

jgalt2122• 1 year ago

Computers were not much of a concern in 1887.

Obviously true, but typewriters were in common business use by then.

nelox• 1 year ago

The claim that “English doesn’t use accents” is, quite frankly, a bit naïve. After all, one only needs to step into a café for a crème brûlée, or to read a novel featuring a tête-à-tête, to see that English is perfectly comfortable with accented words. From the résumé of a job seeker to the façade of a building, from the attaché case of a businessman to the naïve assumptions of a newcomer, accents are sprinkled throughout our language like so many éclairs in a patisserie. English may not have been born with diacritics, but it has certainly acquired a taste for them.

pif9• 1 year ago

If only you had written an example that is not a French word!

You have actually reinforced the thesis you were trying to dispute: English does not use accents.

shakow• 1 year ago

perfectly comfortable

Seeing that virtually none of these are pronounced as they are in the original, I would say that English keeps them out of respect for their source language, but is definitely not comfortable with them.

Twirrim• 1 year ago

In almost every example you state, we've taken the word and the pronunciation, but have dropped the accent marks themselves. It's part of what makes English pronunciation a minefield.

speff• 1 year ago

If I recall correctly, the accent marks only started to get dropped when people began using keyboards. Resumé and fiancée still got an accent when it was handwritten

LurkandComment• 1 year ago

You're trying to create set of rules for something that's evolved from strong oral to written to emphasis on oral again. It's organic and used in coordination with many other countries and their languages. If you understood that many of our rules are defined within specific instances, by specific needs (publishers example), and are somewhat arbitrary, you'd be amazed we have any consensus at all. My theory is that publishers, broadcasters (Like the BBC) and educational institutions are really where standardization has been enforced. Outside of that English and language is as flexible as a sender and receiver of a communication will allow.

r00f• 1 year ago

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.

felipellrocha• 1 year ago

English is your favorite language to read and write? Said no one ever…

tetraca• 1 year ago

I don't see why it couldn't be. It has a pretty large corpus of decent literature/poetry/other media/etc, and the worst people seem to complain about is its inconsistent spelling rules that even native speakers struggle with. In general I'd rather deal with spell check failing on some common homophone from time to time than say, having to memorize arbitrary genders for inanimate nouns that lack any consistent marker and then tables of grammatical cases to apply on them based on those genders. Or having to shove a verb to the end of a complicated sentence and having to unroll the whole thing to figure out what's being said (not to pick on any particular language(s) I've learned).

zahlman5• 1 year ago

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

louthy• 1 year ago

It is my favourite language to read and write.

I am English though.

johnnyjeans3• 1 year ago

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 complex as a romanized tonal language like Mandarin (which has to account for 46 unique glyphs once you account for 4 tones over 6 vowels + the 22 consonants). Or you know, the absolute mess that is romanization of Afro-Asiatic languages. El 3arabizi daiman byi5ali el siza yid7ako, el Latin bas nizaam kteebe mish la2e2 3a lugha hal2ad m3a2ade.

williamdclt4• 1 year ago

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”

codeflo• 1 year ago

It has a massive phonemic inventory, with 44 unique items. Compare with Spanish's 24, or German's 25.

I'm not sure where you're getting these numbers from, but German has around 45 phonemes according to all sources I could find, depending on how you count: 17 vowels (including two different schwa sounds), 3 diphthongs, 25 consonants.

aimanbenbaha• 1 year ago

If Arabic had to cater to afro-asiatic dialects phonemes then the script would have been even more messier. I'm a speaker of one, and my dialect is heavily influenced by the indigenous Tamazight language. and I think this is why many of the Amazigh community were and some still disappointed with the neo-Tifinagh script. While it carries symbolic weight, it doesn’t offer practical readability, phonemic clarity and tech accessibility of a modern script that Tamazight deserves. Latin script, ironically, fits Tamazight much more naturally.

int_19h25• 1 year ago

Diacritics don't need to be used the way they are in French, i.e. to preserve the original spelling. On the contrary, most languages use them to make their spelling more phonetic.

Nor is there a need for some insane kind of diacritics to handle English. Its phonemic inventory is considerable, yes, but it can be easily organized, especially when you keep in mind that many distinct sounds are allophones (and thus don't need a separate representation) - a good example is the glottal stop for "t" in words like "cat", it really doesn't need its own character since it's predictable.

Let's take General American as an example. First you have the consonant phonemes:

Nasals: m,n,ŋ

Plosives: p,b,t,d,k,g

Affricates: t͡ʃ, d͡ʒ

Fricatives: f,v,θ,ð,s,z,ʃ,ʒ,h

Approximants: l,r,j,w

Right away we can see that most are actually covered by the basic Latin alphabet. Affricates can be reasonably represented as plosive-fricative pairs since English doesn't have a contrast between tʃ/t͡ʃ or between dʒ/d͡ʒ; then we can repurpose Jj for ʒ. For ŋ one can adopt a phonemic analysis which treats it as an allophone of the sequence ng that only occurs at the end of the word (with g deleted in this context) and as allophone of n before velars.

Thus, distinct characters are only strictly needed for θ,ð,ʃ, and perhaps ʒ. All of these except for θ actually exist as extended Latin characters in their own right, with proper upper/lowercase pairs, so we could just use them as such: Ðð Ʃʃ Ʒʒ. And for θ there's the historical English thorn: Þþ. The same goes for Ŋŋ if we decide that we do want a distinct letter for it.

If one wants to hew closer to basic Latin look, we could use diacritics. Caron is the obvious candidate for Šš =ʃ and Žž=ʒ, and we could use e.g. crossbar for the other two: Đđ and Ŧŧ. If we're doing that, we might also take Čč for c. And if we really want a distinct letter for ŋ, we could use Ňň.

You can also consider which basic Latin letters are redundant in English when using phonemic spelling. These would be c (can always be replaced with k or s), q (can always be replaced with k), and x (can always be replaced with ks or gz). These can then be repurposed - e.g. if we go with two-letter affricates and then take c=ʃ x=ð q=θ we don't need any diacritics at all!

Moving on to vowels, in GA we have:

Monopthongs: ʌ,æ,ɑ,ɛ,ə,i,ɪ,o,u,ʊ

Diphthongs: aɪ,eɪ,ɔɪ,aʊ,oʊ

R-colored: ɑ˞,ɚ,ɔ˞.

Diphthongs can be reasonably represented using the combination of vowel + y/w for the glide, thus: ay,ey,oy,aw,ow.

For monophthongs, firstly, ʌ can be treated as stressed allophone of ə. If we do so, then all vowels (save for o which stands by itself) form natural pairs which can be expressed as diacritics: Aa=ɑ, Ää=æ, Ee=ɛ, Ëë=ə, Ii=i, Ïï=ɪ, Oo=o, Uu=u, Üü=ʊ.

For R-colored vowels, we can just adopt the phonemic analysis that treats them as vowel+r pairs: ar, er, or.

To sum it all up, we could have a decent phonemic American English spelling using just 4 extra vowel letters with diacritics: ä,ë,ï,ü - if we're okay with repurposing existing redundant letters and spelling affricates as two-letter sequences.

And worst case - if we don't repurpose letters, and with each affricate as well as ŋ getting its own letter - we need 10: ä,č,đ,ë,ï,ň,š,ŧ,ž,ü.

I don't think that's particularly excessive, not even the latter variant.

unethical_ban• 1 year ago

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

vintermann• 1 year ago

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.

mamonoleechi• 1 year ago

Accents in french are pretty irrelevant, you can totally ignore them and master the language. Most french people ignore them while chatting/mailing/texting online.

If you ignore accents, some words can be mistaken for other words (with different accents), but if you check the context, the problem quickly go away.

Accents are just useful to help you pronounce correctly words ; they are also a hint about the word's origin (ex: ^ means the words is greek) ; I don't get why it stopped you from learning the language.

williamdclt4• 1 year ago

Accents in french are pretty irrelevant, you can totally ignore them and master the language. Most french people ignore them while chatting/mailing/texting online.

“Master” would definitely not be correct, but you could write intelligibly enough indeed. It will cause you issues here and there (not being taken seriously, having some miscommunications when the diacritic disambiguates the word…)

If you can’t read the diacritics though, you’ll pronounce words very incorrectly and French is a very unforgiving language for mispronunciation: you will simply not be understood

koverstreet• 1 year ago

Spanish is a bit tidier with them then French, though

lucasoshiro4• 1 year ago

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, but at least it has more rules than exceptions. Part of that is because we use the diacritic marks.

Then, I prefer excessive writing marks than excessive unclear special cases

nemonemo• 1 year ago

How can writing marks help in this regard? I can imagine a language with both a lot of exceptions and writing marks.

darrenf• 1 year ago

Maybe Jazz Emu is onto something: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ69ny57pR0

Izkata2• 1 year ago

Rules exist, but most are never taught and instead only learned through exposure. It's why "ghoti" is a trick - you have to break several rules of English pronunciation to get "fish" out of that.

Here's a page where someone tried to reconstruct as many of those rules as possible: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html - obviously it can't eliminate all exceptions but it does surprisingly well.

Rules 6-8 are relevant to one of your examples, including the explanation afterwards.

zahlman5• 1 year ago

how each word is pronounced individually. What the hell is the difference between "men" and "man"? What's the difference between "bitch" and "beach"?

From what I could easily research, Portuguese has a pretty wide variety of vowel sounds, but it still pales in comparison to the Germanic languages that English took from; and across the spectrum of English dialects and accents you can end up hearing pretty much anything vowel-like that the human voice apparatus can generate. The strength of the difference between "men" and "man" will depend on who's speaking, but it's generally less than Portuguese phonology can accommodate. The "e" sound here should be familiar; the "a" sound not so much. Spanish (and, say, Japanese) learners of English will have much the same problem, but more so; their natural "e" is a bit off.

(From what Wikipedia is telling me, many Brazilian Portuguese dialects will use the right /ɪ/ sound for "bitch" in unstressed syllables. But then, my local accent contrasts /ɪ/ with /i/ quite strongly.)

On the flip side, I struggled with pronouncing Dutch when I made a brief attempt to pick it up; the individual sounds are all straightforward enough, but certain combinations are really unnatural.

bunderbunder• 1 year ago

I think that's probably more because English uses etymological orthography.

So spelling rules are based on four distinct "primary" systems of phonics that can be used depending on whether the word or morpheme has a Germanic, Greek, Latin or French origin. (Yes I know French comes from Latin origin, but the spelling rules differ depending on whether the word was imported directly from Latin, or came in via Norman French.) And then the Germanic and French origin words can get even messier because their spelling was standardized before the Great Vowel Shift. And then whenever we take loanwords from other languages that use the Latin alphabet, we preserve that language's spelling. Which creates a whole mess of special cases where the spelling doesn't follow any of the regular phonetic rules.

If you look at languages where the writing system is famously difficult to learn, a common element they all share is etymological orthography.

trealira7• 1 year ago

What the hell is the difference between "men" and "man"? What's the difference between "bitch" and "beach"?

Those words all have completely different vowels in English; they're not irregular spellings. If you can't tell the difference, you probably just haven't listened to enough English or have said them incorrectly too much to tell the difference.

HorseOfCourse• 1 year ago

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

foobiekr• 1 year ago

Agreed.

Honestly you don’t even need most punctuation.

In about five minutes any literate English speaker can learn to read at full speed with no spaces or other punctuation. Or upside down. Or at an almost arbitrary angle.

I taught myself this when I was learning Japanese 30 years ago to prove a point. Now it’s merely an interesting trick but one with an interesting staying power: with zero practice I maintain the ability.

chuckadams• 1 year ago

Punctuation was indeed a later addition to Latin, as well as lowercase letters.

Aardwolf• 1 year ago

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)

Tadpole9181• 1 year ago

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 contextual, so when they're given explicit symbols that say "use this vowel", they struggle to pick that vowel out. That "symbol to sound" wiring isn't up in the noggin'. A Spanish person learning English will see the Spanish equivalent and go "duh". But an English speaker needs those "like in bird" tables.

Luckily, we have a huge phonemic index (because of all the stealing), so we're actually at an advantage from many languages once that hurdle is crossed. Spare tonality.

sotix5• 1 year ago

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.

hbn3• 1 year ago

If anything, I'd guess that when speaking English as second language, harder than knowing the accents on words would just be keeping track of all the exceptions in pronunciation between words that you basically just have to memorize. Tough, though, taught, thought, through, thorough, throughout, etc.

ASalazarMX• 1 year ago

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 would have benefited a great deal from an equivalent to the Royal Spanish Academy.

tshaddox2• 1 year ago

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.

LoveMortuus• 1 year ago

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).

epiccoleman• 1 year ago

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".

jsbg• 1 year ago

As an ESL person I do wish English used accents the way Spanish does to indicate what syllable has the primary emphasis.

serial_dev• 1 year ago

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.

wink2• 1 year ago

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.

W3zzy• 1 year ago

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...

trueismywork4• 1 year ago

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.

meindnoch• 1 year ago

So that it fits into 7-b it ASCII.

Lendal• 1 year ago

To summarize the article, when a language has a single creator, (in this case, the person who runs the first major printing press in France,) that person has immense power to make significant changes to the language when needed. On the other hand if the language has multiple collaborators each with some influence to make changes to the language, such changes tend to be much more conservative ones.

csomar• 1 year ago

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 Internet's language wasn't just shaped by politics or economics, but by something as simple as which language was more convenient to type.

alephnerd• 1 year ago

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.

athenot2• 1 year ago

Yes, this is the pragmatic answer.

Apple's HyperCard had a French dialect, and AppleScript followed with one too. It was short-lived but did provide a window as to how these programming languages might have looked like had they originated in a non-English world.

A fun factoid I just discovered: on March 11, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signs an executive order mandating that ASCII be adopted as a federal information processing standard for electronic data interchange between federal agencies. This order was known as... Executive Order 11110 :)

crabbone• 1 year ago

Well, there's this story about how printing failed Arabic. Allegedly, in Italy, they tried to print a Koran, but because the printers didn't speak Arabic, and were trained on Latin scripts, they messed it up so much that the Arab world came to believe printing is not going to work for them. Even though most scientific books of the day were written in Arabic and the best schools spoke the language, it quickly fell out of favor, being replaced by Latin in Europe.

In turn, the Caliphate made a point of standardizing the script and creating libraries which fueled research science for a good few centuries.

----

Even before Internet, languages with diacritics (eg. Russian Ё) were deprecating their use. I believe something similar is happening in German (with ß). Also, languages with long history seen incremental thinning out of the alphabet to remove duplication and rare special cases. Sometimes, the opposite happened, but it was usually brought by reactionary politics, especially inspired by local nationalism which looked for validation in ancient history. So, for example, in the 90s Ukrainians brought back the letter Ґ that was used in only a handful of words, and was happily forgotten during the Soviet times.

So, convenience and suitability for new technology can be a meaningful factor in adoption.

trueismywork4• 1 year ago

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.

SllX• 1 year ago

I mean that might be part of it, but also because the internet developed out of the ARPAnet which was a United States Department of Defense project, at a time when the United States was one of two superpowers (right as the other superpower stopped being a superpower or for that matter a state), in a world that already gave pretty heavy weight towards English as the lingua franca in international institutions after World War II or simply because it was the lowest-common denominator in a lot of the world post-the British Empire.

English had a lot of wind beneath its wings. Still does.

graypegg• 1 year ago

Tangential: Ùù has always seemed immensely silly to me. It’s given an entire key on the CSA keyboard despite only being officially used in 1 non-proper-noun word: où. It’s there solely to disambiguate with ou, the actual phonetics are not affected. Whenever I look down at my MacBook’s keyboard I think it seems a bit out of place haha

MangoToupe• 1 year ago

Maybe that makes sense for french vs english, but there are plenty of languages that avoid accents in transcription (despite being just as tonal or more so than english) because they don't have the analytic diction required to discuss the abstract concepts all over programming, computer science, and even just "business".

hbn3• 1 year ago

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.

gabrielgio• 1 year ago

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.

jmclnx• 1 year ago

I came here to say the same, I remember the days when some systems only had upper case characters and the character set was limited.

That may have allowed for more control characters they would be allowed in other European Languages.

Xunjin• 1 year ago

A point that is always good to think about, a population defines its language and a language defines its population, it's a symbiotic relationship. The language you speak, will shape how you perceive/interact/understand the world itself.

cvoss3• 1 year ago

Do the tittles on `i` and `j` count as diacritics? In English those vowel symbols never appear without their tittles. (In contrast, the related vowel symbol `y`, which is like an `ij` combo and is named "Greek I" in French, never appears with tittles!) In some sense, the glyphs are idiomatically atomic with the diacritics permanently stuck to them.

RiverCrochet2• 1 year ago

I don't think so; the tittle is part of the lowercase form of the letter. If it was a diacritic, it could appear with the uppercase forms as well.

dawnofdusk3• 1 year ago

In French you can (and most people do) drop diacritics from all uppercase forms.

bazoom422• 1 year ago

They are not diacritics since they don’t alter the sound of the letter.

cvoss3• 1 year ago

I don't know what a headless `i` or `j` would sound like in English, since they aren't used. So it's not really a verifiable claim that the tittles don't alter the sound.

adolph• 1 year ago

For the record, Wikipedia states they are diacritics. I'm leaning toward agreeing due to this observation: "In most Latin-based orthographies, the lowercase letter i conventionally has its dot replaced when a diacritical mark atop the letter, such as a tilde or caron, is placed." Ex: aeiouyj, âêîôûyj, äëïöüÿj, áéíóúyj́ (oops, my example shows an accent above the J's tittle–down one, but three up)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tittle

owenversteeg• 1 year ago

We do, of course, use accents and other diacritics. It's not as common as in other languages, but most people will come across a few each day. The popular argument here is that many are French, with the accents optional, yet soupçon and exposé are rarely written naked. If you want non-French, pick up the New Yorker and you will find coöperative and reëlect, or a poem to find changèd and learnèd. We use them in names, from Brontë to Beyoncé.

There is an excellent Wikipedia article that goes into detail on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical...

acc_297• 1 year ago

-Naïve- is the example I think I see most often but I think it’s often spelled -naive- and no one would fuss too much with either spelling

sudobash1• 1 year ago

English still sometimes (albeit very rarely) uses one type of diacritic. The diaeresis is in occasional use. Now days it is mainly used in the word "naïve," but it will be familiar to readers of the New Yorker on words like "coöperate."

The diaeresis is used disambiguate when a pair of vowels make two separate vowel-sounds, instead of one. For instance, if you didn't know better, you would think that the words "naive" and "nave" (said "nāv", the congregational of a traditional church) were homophones. But the diaeresis shows you that the "a" and "i" are said independently (nah-ēv).

Of course, English also uses diacritics occasionally in some borrowed words: résumé, née, fiancée/fiancé. But these are also considered optional.

gavinward2• 1 year ago

if you didn't know better

It's funny how The New Yorker clings to this given its readership is mostly people who absolutely do know better.

renox• 1 year ago

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.

Why English doesn't use accents

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