[HN Gopher] Why English doesn't use accents
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Why English doesn't use accents
Author : sandbach
Score : 33 points
Date : 2025-07-06 21:18 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.deadlanguagesociety.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.deadlanguagesociety.com)
| mikequinlan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If you go early enough, my understanding is that people would
| write accents in ascii by doing:
|
| e <backspace character> '
|
| Which was called "overstriking".
| Dwedit wrote:
| Diacritics aren't unambiguous, there are different conventions
| for using them. What sound does "a" make? It depends.
| Affric wrote:
| If what it depends on is the language then thats trivial.
| dijit wrote:
| Why is it trivial?
|
| The a and a sounds in Swedish and Finnish are swapped; and
| they're direct neighbours (with compulsory education for
| Swedish in Finland, no less).
| andy99 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| English is currently popular because money is always popular
| dijit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| ayende wrote:
| French was the lingua franca for a very long time (pun
| intended)
| porphyra wrote:
| The Economist magazine uses a diaeresis (two dots) in words like
| "cooperate" and "reelect" to indicate that both vowels are
| pronounced separately, rather than as a diphthong. This is
| considered old-school and uncommon though.
| SnooSux wrote:
| Unless The Economist does it as well, you were probably
| thinking of The New Yorker.
|
| https://www.arrantpedantry.com/2020/03/24/umlauts-diaereses-...
| nlawalker wrote:
| Learning the relationship between a _diaeresis_ and a
| _diphthong_ and then seeing that the word diaeresis _contains_
| a diphthong has rounded out my day nicely, thanks for that.
| amelius wrote:
| 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
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