[HN Gopher] Why English doesn't use accents
___________________________________________________________________
Why English doesn't use accents
Author : sandbach
Score : 294 points
Date : 2025-07-06 21:18 UTC (1 days 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".
| PyWoody wrote:
| If you go back even further, you get the iota subscript [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iota_subscript
| demetrius wrote:
| Iota subscript is a 12-century invention. Rough and smooth
| breathings (a for ha, a for a) are much older Greek
| diacritics.
|
| For another example of classical diacritics, see apices in
| Latin (a for long a).
| kps wrote:
| 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).
| wanderingstan wrote:
| Interesting! The z80 card in my family's Apple 2 would
| render "^" as "|" and I always wondered the connection. I
| guess they were using the original spec.
| kps wrote:
| And probably '-' where we now have '_'. Character-
| generator ICs with the 1963 64-character set hung on
| around for a couple decades.
| int_19h wrote:
| This comes from typewriters. Curiously, the reason why
| Esperanto uses C, G, H, J, and S 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 A, E, U - since it was a distinct key used for
| overtyping, it could be repurposed in this manner, just like
| Unicode combining marks today.
| mousethatroared wrote:
| 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.
| eesmith wrote:
| Only th (thorn) died with the printing of Caxton's Bible
| using y-, for cost reasons.
|
| The other letters -- w (wynn), ae (ash), and d (eth) -- went
| out of use long before movable type printing.
| https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/the-lost-letters-of-
| th...
| california-og wrote:
| And long s:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s
|
| AFAIK it was dropped out because the top hook of the long s
| punch broke easily, and could be easily replaced with a
| basic s.
| eesmith wrote:
| Your link says s (the long s) didn't disappear (from
| English) until several hundred years after the movable
| type printing press and makes no mention of physical
| problems when using that letter, suggesting instead
| removal gave a type a more modern feel:
|
| > Pioneer of type design John Bell (1746-1831), who
| started the British Letter Foundry in 1788, is often
| "credited with the demise of the long s".[12] Paul W.
| Nash concluded that the change mostly happened very fast
| in 1800, and believes that this was triggered by the
| Seditious Societies Act. To discourage subversive
| publications, this required printing to name the identity
| of the printer, and so in Nash's view gave printers an
| incentive to make their work look more modern.
| dfawcus wrote:
| The 'ae' glyph is still used in printed English, e.g.
| spelling of 'Encyclopaedia', 'paedophile'
|
| Similarly thhe 'oe' glyph is also used, often in medical
| contexts.
|
| The loss of thorn is somewhat sad, as it is still easily
| understood by native speakers when substituted for its
| modern digraph.
| eesmith wrote:
| As I understand it, ae was a letter in Old English while
| The same glyph in Modern English is a ligature, wid no
| linguistic connection between the two.
|
| Last year at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267080 I found
| that in the 1800s the ligatures ae, oe, fl, ff, ffi, fi
| and ffl were pretty common in type collections.
| mbonnet wrote:
| And yet only in non-American printed English.
| KurSix wrote:
| All hail the first software engineers of the scriptorium
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| 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 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).
| forinti wrote:
| But within each language it is well defined.
|
| Between languages, even the letters have different uses.
| Diacritics can be used to signal a different sound or the
| tonicity of the word (at least in the languages I know
| those are the two uses).
|
| I don't understand what this thread is all about. English
| doesn't need accents because there's no universal meaning
| attached to each one? That doesn't make sense.
| em-bee wrote:
| not just neighbors by country. a not insignificant
| proportion of finns speak swedish natively
| lrasinen wrote:
| Do you have any examples? As a Finnish speaker the Swedish
| "a" sounds the same. "Pappa", "framtiden" etc.
|
| It's "a" and "e" which have swapped uses, but it's not
| exactly consistent (e.g. "Jarnvagstorget" where first a is
| close to the Finnish a, second a is closer to e but so is
| the e at the end)
| dijit wrote:
| A in Swedish is an ae sound.
|
| A in Finnish is a pitched A sound, like the A in "cat".
|
| The pitched "a" in Swedish is the default one.
| lrasinen wrote:
| Wikipedia lists both "cat" and the Finnish "maki" under
| ae: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-
| open_front_unrounded_vo...
|
| Do you have some example words that would show the
| difference?
| dijit wrote:
| Well, mostly hearing people say the words will be
| telling.
|
| Gavle in Sweden: https://forvo.com/word/g%C3%A4vle/
|
| Linnanmaki in Finland:
| https://forvo.com/word/linnanm%C3%A4ki/
|
| In the Finnish example you can hear both the soft "en"
| (linnan) and the higher pitched "A" (maki) which is
| triggered with umlauts;
|
| Where the Swedish A is _softened_ by umlauts in the Gavle
| example.
| 3836293648 wrote:
| That's an american cat then, because that sounds crazy to
| my ears
| dijit wrote:
| (how did I get downvoted for this when I literally lived
| in both countries)
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| 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.
| shiroiuma wrote:
| >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.
| jraph wrote:
| Spanish seems quite decent in both of these aspects.
| shiroiuma wrote:
| It's easier than German, but it's still a pain because of
| gendered nouns. English was right to dump that crap
| centuries ago.
| jraph wrote:
| Indeed!
| jraph wrote:
| > 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)
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| FWIW, both "history" and "literature" have the number
| syllables you would expect in my dialect of English
| (Western American), at least among people I know. But I
| know exactly what you are talking about! Many regional
| dialects drop the "o" in history and the first "e" in
| literature.
|
| On the other hand, we do violence to the pronunciation of
| "comfortable". I've lived in so many parts of the English
| speaking world that I can partially code switch
| pronunciation for some dialects. Kind of weird but not that
| bad.
| jraph wrote:
| Interesting!
|
| So how do you pronounce comfortable there?
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| In American English, it is common to pronounce it
| something like "comf-ter-ble" in most dialects. Some
| dialects of e.g. British English pronounce it as you
| would expect from the spelling with 4 syllables. I can't
| think of an American dialect that pronounces it
| correctly. Perhaps some New England or Canadian dialects
| do?
|
| My experience traveling around the English speaking world
| is that it is very forgiving of pronunciation. What trips
| you up is differences in vocabulary and semantics. You
| have to learn a new dictionary and a bit of inexplicable
| grammar everywhere you travel. I've learned very
| different languages that had similar relationships to
| adjacent languages; the words are all familiar but the
| meanings of those words have been remapped to something
| else. English tends toward a similar pattern.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| zajio1am wrote:
| > 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.
| 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.
| lenzm wrote:
| > the hollywood propaganda machine - and it owes about 90%
| of it's success to that
|
| Who's being glib now? Most people learn English because
| it's means making more money - in technology, finance,
| tourism, ...
| nicoburns wrote:
| That probably depends where you live. A lot of Nordic
| people tell me the learnt English as a kid watching
| cartoons, long before they were thinking of such things.
| em-bee wrote:
| we learn english because it is a subject in school. money
| does not come into consideration for most people. the
| motivation to teach english in school is another question
| however. as is the motivation for parents to pay for
| extra english classes outside of school.
| yongjik wrote:
| > The absolute selling point of English is the fact that
| since it has no proper rules ...
|
| Anyone who thinks English has "no proper rules" clearly has
| never had the joy of learning English as a second language.
|
| (Or maybe they have a really warped notion of what "formal
| rules" mean when it comes to languages. There are no
| natural human languages in the world that are dictated by
| formal rules. All formal rules are after-the-fact
| descriptions devised to explain the language that is
| already there.)
| shagie wrote:
| > Anyone who thinks English has "no proper rules" clearly
| has never had the joy of learning English as a second
| language.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophony#Ablaut-
| motivated_comp... and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication#English
|
| Tic Tac Toe is the one that I remember most easily...
|
| > Examples include: bric-a-brac, chit-chat, clip-clop,
| ding-dong, flimflam, flip-flop, hip-hop, jibber-jabber,
| kitty-cat, knick-knack, mishmash, ping-pong, pitter-
| patter, riffraff, sing-song, slipslop, splish-splash,
| tick-tock, ticky-tacky, tip-top, whiff-whaff, wibble-
| wobble, wishy-washy, zig-zag.
|
| Saying _any_ of those in the wrong order sounds wrong to
| a native ear.
|
| It even shows up in Live, Laugh, Love.
|
| And then there's adjective order...
| https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-
| grammar/...
|
| --
|
| If people want a language with "proper rules"... head
| over to conlangs. https://youtu.be/x_x_PQ85_0k
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil is my favorite
| (I've got a copy of the grammar guide that is on my shelf
| of random things next to Random Numbers by the RAND
| corporation).
| dijit wrote:
| English regularly violates its own rules and additionally
| has no correcting body (Swedish has central body that
| dictates language rules for example).
|
| That's part of why it's so difficult to fully master, and
| there are rules (sentence structure) for clarity, but
| there's no actually solid rules for pronunciation (it
| differs depending on word) or even what words are really
| proper words (there are central dictionaries that largely
| agree, but there are also "Hinglish", patois and the
| other creole dialects).
|
| English steals aggressively from other languages, since
| that's its history. Other languages might borrow some
| words but there's multiple branches of these inside
| english. You can use English with only latin-root words,
| or English with only Germanic-root words and both are as
| valid english as each other.
|
| Easy to learn; awful to master.
| demetrius wrote:
| > English regularly violates its own rules
|
| That's true for any human language. E.g. in Russian,
| adjectives use the gender, case and plurality of a noun,
| until they suddenly don't.
|
| > English steals aggressively from other languages, since
| that's its history.
|
| That's not unique to English. E.g. Japanese has even
| borrowed numerals, and some of its pronouns are
| borrowings. Russian has borrowed verb forms.
|
| Having a lot of Latin borrowings is quite common in most
| European languages. Even in Romance languages, there are
| a lot of Latin borrowings (e.g. minuto is Latin
| borrowing, miudo is a native Portuguese word).
|
| > You can use English with only latin-root words, or
| English with only Germanic-root words and both are as
| valid english as each other.
|
| That's similar to how e.g. Romanian has Latin-based and
| Slavic-based vocabulary. This is not that unique.
|
| > but there are also "Hinglish", patois and the other
| creole dialects
|
| Many languages have or had patois and creoles based on
| them.
| kergonath wrote:
| > If English wasn't as easy to learn as it is, it would
| have been destroyed though.
|
| I really dislike this argument. It treats English as a
| mythical, exceptional language even though it really is
| not.
|
| English was not particularly hard or easy compared to other
| European languages. It did not have a particularly hard or
| easy structure, and orthography took centuries to normalise
| in continental languages as well. It had the quirk of
| combining Germanic grammar with Romance vocabulary, but
| that's relevant for linguists, not most speakers.
|
| What happened is that it _was_ simplified and adapted over
| the course of centuries.
|
| French was not displaced by English because of some magical
| language qualities. The French were displaced by the
| British somewhat, but mostly by the Americans and language
| followed.
| 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
| OneMorePerson wrote:
| 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)
| teleforce wrote:
| 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
| dmurray wrote:
| > Chinese is hard in unnecessary way both in language
| speaking and writing.
|
| Is spoken Mandarin really "hard in an unnecessary way"? I
| think it's quite straightforward, except for the tones. The
| tones are difficult for anyone who isn't a native speaker
| of a tonal language. But they are trivial to learn as a
| child, and easy to learn for native speakers of say Thai (a
| mostly unrelated language that also happens to use tones).
| Uneducated people in all walks of life speak both Mandarin
| and their local dialect well.
|
| Written Chinese really is objectively difficult, and it's a
| believable argument that before Mao it was intentionally
| gatekept that way to have a caste of intellectual "elites".
| em-bee wrote:
| in addition, chinese grammar is very easy. what makes
| learning chinese hard is the writing because it is
| difficult in itself and you can't use it to reinforce the
| learning of spoken words or vice versa.
| teleforce wrote:
| >The tones are difficult for anyone who isn't a native
| speaker of a tonal language
|
| That's the the majority of the world's population.
| dmurray wrote:
| Sure, but it's a tiny minority of Chinese learners.
|
| "Hard in an unnecessary way" implies that it's
| objectively difficult and complex, not just different
| from what certain outsiders are used to.
| ayende wrote:
| French was the lingua franca for a very long time (pun
| intended)
| jonathanlb wrote:
| 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.
| acheron wrote:
| Yes, the "Franks" in "lingua franca" were mostly Italians.
| OneMorePerson wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| elision, 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.
| kergonath wrote:
| > I always found French to be very much the opposite in
| spoken form, due to the 'consonnes finales muettes' and
| liaison and elision, 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.
| cvoss wrote:
| > I will never be able to pronounce correctly a word I
| never heard before.
|
| This happens not infrequently to native English speakers.
| It's especially prominent for people who read a lot when
| they're young and develop a large vocabulary that doesn't
| get socialized until much later. My English teacher, of all
| people, was notorious for this.
|
| Real life examples from native speakers: Emphasizing the
| wrong syllable in "forage", "respite", and "parameter".
| Pronouncing "draught" like "fraught". Softening "chasm" and
| "chaos". And an extra syllable (long e sound) in
| "homogeneous".
| kergonath wrote:
| This is my experience as well. I would just add
|
| > Emphasizing the wrong syllable
|
| As a native French speaker, I will never be able to
| emphasise the right syllable in any language, ever :D
|
| Stress is just not really a thing in French, and it is
| quite difficult to get it intuitively later in life.
| int_19h wrote:
| It's fairly easy when the stress is consistent or mostly
| so. In English thought it's a phonemic feature in its own
| right so there's no general rule to memorize in the first
| place - you just have to learn it for each word.
| teleforce wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| Harsh but that rings true. In it's defense i'll point out
| that English is exponentially more useful in the modern
| world and even French has started borrowing nouns from
| English. Also English has more words then any other
| language which in my mind makes it the best. (to clarify i
| know a little of other languages and i understand that
| there are concepts which English is not even equipped to
| express properly but i stand by what i write)
|
| I'm still learning, English is huge and it can be a delight
| to discover.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Most words in foreign languages that most people believe
| don't have an English equivalent often do, but the
| English word is so obscure that almost no native English
| speaker knows it, and as you point out, English
| vocabulary is so large that no one will ever come close
| to learning it all. English is the C++ of human
| languages.
|
| What interests me is the prominence of words in foreign
| languages that have an extremely obscure equivalent in
| English. Like, why do they devote common vocabulary to it
| and what does it mean that they do?
|
| I have been conversational in languages almost no one
| learns from parts of the world no one cares about. They
| are full of words like this and I _still_ use those words
| in English because that was the first word I learned for
| the concept. But when I've taken the time to see if an
| equivalent English word exists, it always does.
| Ironically, it is safer to assume that my ignorance of
| the English language (my native language) is more likely
| than the lack of a word in English for a thing.
| teleforce wrote:
| > English is the C++ of human languages
|
| You can say that again.
|
| That's exactly what I'm alluding in my other comments
| thread but referring to Chinese language and writing
| system complexity rather than English for the C++ and
| Rust, but on second thought Rust probably be the Chinese
| equivalent.
|
| > But when I've taken the time to see if an equivalent
| English word exists, it always does.
|
| It's the same happen with C++ that has been ripping up
| Dlang features for quite sometimes now including its new
| module system [1].
|
| [1] Converting a large mathematical software package
| written in C++ to C++20 modules (42 comments):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44433899
| shagie wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| dadoum wrote:
| Fun fact, in your first sentence there is approximately 30%
| of the words which are not Germanic.
|
| (my separation of the words, which may be slightly off:
|
| While of the words come from, in any written or spoken the
| falls. All the small words we and the of our is //
| dictionary French sentence number dramatically joining use
| core grammar Germanic )
| paulmooreparks wrote:
| 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.
| KurSix wrote:
| But I think its global dominance has more to do with historical
| and economic factors than linguistic flexibility
| 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-...
| porphyra wrote:
| Oops I think you are right. My parents subscribed to both and
| I must have mixed them up.
| 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.
| schoen wrote:
| I enjoyed learning recently that the most common diacritics
| in Czech are the hacek and the carka. The word "hacek" has a
| carka followed by a hacek, while the word "carka" has a hacek
| followed by by a carka!
| madcaptenor wrote:
| A "calque" is a word that's been brought from one language
| into another by translating the individual parts. A
| "loanword" is a word that's been brought over by just
| taking the word with little modification.
|
| For example, "calque" is a loanword, while "loanword" (from
| German "Lehnwort") is a calque.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Similarly, a grave accent is sometimes used in poetry to
| indicate that a single vowel is voiced - e.g. in "cursed" 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: cliche, facade,
| doppelganger, jalapeno.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| But it's habanero, not habanero - people mistakenly put the n
| by analogy with jalapeno.
| o11c wrote:
| The adjective "learned" (meaning "well-educated") is a native
| English word that should take the grave accent even outside
| of poetry. Also "unlearned".
| MLR wrote:
| Winged and legged are still pronounced like that too, at
| least by some.
|
| Interestingly, as an addition to the parent comment,
| there's a certain point in time where a lot of -ed words
| are often spelt -'d, which presumably is from the
| transitionary period between the expectation that the -ed
| was pronounced and today's general pronunciation.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| You see this in Shakespeare's plays, "-ed" endings are
| the equivalent of "-ed", whereas "-'d" is pronounced
| "-ed" as is common today.
| dfawcus wrote:
| Oddly enough, I pronounce 'legged' that way, but not
| 'winged'.
|
| e.g. "Long legged monster"
| robin_reala wrote:
| There's also the (dying) use of diareses to indicate vowel
| stress, for example cooperative or naive.
| eadmund wrote:
| I've always seen it written with an _acute_ accent: 'cursed.'
| Wikipedia notes both usages, but to my knowledge I have never
| once read a poem which used a grave accent that way.
| ww520 wrote:
| Used to just be a dash, like re-elect. Cooperate was co-
| operate. People got tired of writing dashes and they got
| shortened.
| nicoburns wrote:
| That seems like a quirk of the magazine for thsie pstticular
| words, but its more common for some others like "naive" and
| "Zoe", although that's gone out of fashion somewhat since
| computers took over (and I believe both of those are loan words
| in english)
| racingmars wrote:
| I don't remember ever seeing that in The Economist.
|
| I think you're thinking of New Yorker magazine, perhaps?
| asielen wrote:
| 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 jalapeno 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.
|
| Jalapeno is in the OED with the tilde
| https://www.oed.com/dictionary/jalapeno_n?tab=factsheet#1253...
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| > 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'Academie
| Francaise - English is no special exception.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I like to believe that, by definition, the _only_ person
| who speaks English properly is the King of England.
| Everyone else has an accent.
| brabel wrote:
| I see naive as an example of diacritics in English as well.
| gavinward wrote:
| I find it interesting that the Spanish consider the n to be a
| separate letter, in their 27 letter alphabet.
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| 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 Noel or Chloe.
| int_19h wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 role, which invokes this classic:
| https://i.redd.it/qrfr7o4ue2z51.jpg
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| Fascinating. I had wrote that off as a bug in their CMS.
| bloak wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dawnofdusk wrote:
| >Similarly, Chinese and Korean names are usually written in
| the order they are pronounced, while Japanese names are
| reversed.
|
| As a Chinese speaker this is maddeningly confusing when
| reading Western media. It's also a fairly new trend, I want
| to say a decade ago Chinese and Korean names were also read
| in Western order.
| 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
| knome wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| efilife wrote:
| I don't know how to write this in a more polite way. I keep
| seeing bootlickers that defend this absolute atrocity of a
| language and they always find ridiculous contradicting ways
| to say how English is actually not fucked up. It is. I
| maintain a list of words (since 2022) where I collect many
| inconsistencies in English like:
|
| infinite, finite
|
| sign, signal
|
| wind, rewind
|
| heave, heavy
|
| And countless more like this. This language is beyond
| fucked and this is not possible to defend logically. This
| also causes many problems for people who learn english
| solely by speaking, they don't know the difference between
| "its" and "it's", "they/they're/their" and so on. In my
| native language these kinds of errors are impossible as how
| you pronounce letters doesn't change depending on the word
| they are in
| selectodude wrote:
| English lacking a language regulator makes it hard to be
| a bootlicker for that particular language. Whose boot are
| they licking?
| eviks wrote:
| The blob's
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| What was the poem (song?) that captured many more of
| these? (Anyone?)
| defrost wrote:
| _The Chaos_ (1922) by Gerard Nolst Trenite ?
|
| https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/
| cha...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw (and others
| similar)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Bingo!
| toast0 wrote:
| > wind, rewind
|
| Wind and rewind are fine. It's just wind and wind are a
| problem, like read and read.
|
| For example, wind and rewind sound the same in: Rewind
| that, so I can see him wind up.
| yread wrote:
| also wound and wound
| jcranmer wrote:
| The best 'defense' of English spelling I'm aware of is
| https://www.zompist.com/spell.html, which at the end
| admits:
|
| > I doubt that this page will convince anyone that
| English spelling is a good system. There's too many
| oddities. [...] What I hope to have shown, however, is
| that beneath all the pitfalls, there's a rather clever
| and fairly regular mechanism at work, and one which still
| gets the vast majority of words pretty much correct. It's
| not to modern tastes, but by no means as broken as people
| think.
|
| Which is to say, English spelling is definitely messed
| up. But it's not some insane thing that lacks any hint of
| sanity that some people try to portray it as.
| ragazzina wrote:
| This article feels to me as it was written in bad faith,
| trying and failing to prove a point, but then positing
| the point was proved.
|
| The author happily start the article by submitting:
|
| >The purpose of this page is to describe [...] the rules
| that tell you how to pronounce a written word correctly
| over 85% of the time.
|
| but then they quietly show that with their whole page of
| rules, the reader will not actually pronounce 85% of the
| words _correctly_ as they just claimed, but actually less
| than 60%. By arbitrarily deciding that a number of errors
| can be considered small, the author bumps the number of
| "correctly pronounced words" to 85%.
|
| Are we talking about 85% of the whole language? No, just
| 5000 words. Even if they are the most frequent in the
| written language, they would still only account for
| around 95% of all the words.
|
| The author position is:
|
| - people complain about the English spelling all the
| time, saying it's horrible
|
| - the English spelling is actually pretty systematic and
| this page will explain the rules to understand it
|
| - when you will have mastered these rules, you will
| pronounce half of the words perfectly - for extremely
| common words such as "give", "get", "real", "very",
| "put", "half" you are still SOL
|
| - the english spelling is not so horrible after all: as a
| perfect student you will only butcher more than 1 word
| every 10 spoken
|
| To me, the author has proved the point he was trying to
| disprove.
|
| (and in which rule do /'sING@/ and /'fINGg@r/ end up?)
| Pooge wrote:
| Could you please share your list? I have this discussion
| a few times per year and I'd love to hand that list to
| people that think written English makes sense.
|
| I was thinking of writing a blog article on it but I
| don't think I'd need to anymore!
| marci wrote:
| > In my native language these kinds of errors are
| impossible as how you pronounce letters doesn't change
| depending on the word they are in
|
| Don't forget when the pronunciation depends solely on the
| meaning.
|
| Live or Live?
| brainwad wrote:
| Your examples are more or less regular though. English is
| a stress-based language, so it's expected that
| pronunciation might change when you add an extra
| syllable, if the stress moves (syllable -> syllabic is
| another example, btw).
|
| > wind, rewind
|
| This one is trivial, no? the "wind" in "rewind" is
| pronounced the same, with /aj/. The "wind" with /I/ is
| unrelated.
| huimang wrote:
| All languages have inconsistencies, but it seems in vogue
| these days to single out english and use it as a punching
| bag. Furthermore, no natural human languages (i.e. not
| artificially constructed ones like esperanto) are
| logical. They all have irregularities and illogical
| aspects.
|
| It is not "beyond fucked" that things have different
| pronunciations sometimes. Other languages have problems
| for people who solely learn by speaking. It's not unique
| to english.
| int_19h wrote:
| English is singled out because its orthography really is
| atrociously bad even when compared with other languages.
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.13321
| coffeeling wrote:
| A Dutch man wrote an amazing poem highlighting the
| absurdity of English orthography: https://people.cs.georg
| etown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/cha...
| pookha wrote:
| As someone that enjoys reading I can't think of a more
| descriptive language than the English language...It's
| easily one of the most powerful languages on earth and has
| twice (!) the number of words in its vocabulary compared to
| something like French, which is heavily centralized by some
| managerial class. You just have to appreciate the language
| for what its strengths are (unbounded capability to
| communicate using just words) vs what you as a novice need
| to do to master it. Which, to be frank, is easier than
| mastering something like the Korean language that has all
| this drama and ceremony around politeness and speech
| levels.
| jcranmer wrote:
| 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
| /S/ 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
| /I/ 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 /e/ (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 wrote:
| 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.
| mousethatroared wrote:
| But English orthography isn't meant to serve foreigners.
|
| Im ESL, I struggled with English spelling as much as the
| next latin speaker who's already learned to read and write
| in foreigner.
|
| But now that I get the reason behind it, I love it. I
| consider English orthography worthy of UNESCO protection,
| even. In fact, I am annoyed at the regular spelling of my
| two latin languages that have left so much history behind.
| hyperpape wrote:
| > But English orthography isn't meant to serve
| foreigners.
|
| Or natives. It is slower for children to learn to read
| English than other languages.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| Teaching my toddler to read now and I definitely feel
| like if we spoke Spanish my work would be done already.
| bluGill wrote:
| Probably not. Toddlers generally don't have the brain to
| learn any reading. Spanish's advantages in reading isn't
| how young you can start learning to read, it is how fast
| you can stop reading. Spanish schools stop teaching
| reading takes about 5 years to learn, English 6, and
| Japanese 9 - after that much training kids are finally
| considered to read anything. (sometimes we talk about
| college level reading, but that is more about mastery of
| topic specific topic - Doctors, lawyers, and engineers
| each have special vocabulary that needs extra training to
| read, but they cannot read each other's technical papers)
| mousethatroared wrote:
| I learned how to read in six months.
|
| My kid took two and half years.
|
| The Chinese take 10 years.
|
| So what? Are the Chinese terribly educated?
| akst wrote:
| English Orthography doesn't exactly serve native speakers
| either.
| devilbunny wrote:
| It's fairly good at helping us understand the etymology.
| Have a "y" acting as a vowel in the spelling? Good chance
| it's Greek. Have a "k"? Almost certainly not Latin.
| bluGill wrote:
| That is trivia that is useless in almost all contexts.
| I've been a native English speaker all my life and this
| is the first I've heard of that. I can't think of any
| situation in life where knowing that fact would have been
| helpful. Your claim seems reasonable, but if someone says
| you are wrong I wouldn't fact check it even if clear
| links were posted so that I could.
| mousethatroared wrote:
| Im a materials scientist and I use etymology every day.
|
| Knowing etymology is a an easy way to memorize things.
| devilbunny wrote:
| If you're seeing a word for the first time, it is pretty
| useful - partly with pronunciation but definitely with
| meaning.
|
| You do have to have some familiarity with the source
| languages, but if it's an unfamiliar but nativized word,
| those are almost always ultimately Latin or Greek.
| int_19h wrote:
| If you're seeing the word for the first time and need to
| figure out how to pronounce it, how would you know that
| "y" is acting as a vowel and not as a consonant in the
| first place?
| devilbunny wrote:
| If it's followed by a vowel, it's likely a Germanic word:
| yule, your, young, yellow (and you probably know the
| word, since our core vocabulary is still mostly
| Germanic). If it's at the end or between consonants, like
| syllabary or ontogeny, probably Greek.
|
| You might also just happen to know a smattering (or even
| a lot) of Greek and Latin.
| papichulo2023 wrote:
| As a non native, it still bothers me how "toward" is
| pronounced, "toord", really?
| gatlin wrote:
| come to texas and experience a whole universe of dipthongs
| (one of which remedies this)
| jojobas wrote:
| It's not, unless you're a yankee. They're going to hear
| you're a foreigner anyway, might as well speak Queen's
| English.
| Tagbert wrote:
| 'W' started out as a long 'U' so it's not unreasonable
| int_19h wrote:
| It was _spelled_ as a double U originally (hence the
| name), but that doesn 't mean that it was pronounced as a
| long U! It was always an approximant.
| antod wrote:
| That's just one accent. Most accents pronounce that W
| (especially outside the US).
| simondotau wrote:
| If you think that's crazy, consider that "English" is the
| only word in the English language that spells the /ING/
| ('ing') sound as "eng".
| o11c wrote:
| Eh, not really.
|
| "engage", "engorge", "engrave", "engross", "engulf" are
| all fairly common words that are either often or
| exclusively pronounced that way (some dictionaries might
| show /in-g/, but /n/ is really /NG/ before g or k, even
| if they remain). Since these can take prefixes, this also
| proves we're not limited to being at the start of a word.
| Searching for words that can be spelled with with "ing"
| or "eng" finds a few more but nothing super interesting
| (though a few are in the middle of a word).
|
| Obviously words where "g" is pronounced /dZ/ (like "j"
| for those who can't read IPA) aren't subject to this.
| simondotau wrote:
| You might be right, but for what it's worth I've
| literally never heard any of those words pronounced that
| way. I've only ever heard the word "English" start with
| the same sound as _inside,_ while "engage" and your other
| examples start with the same sound as _entertain._
| stavros wrote:
| While you're right, I feel like there's no safe argument
| to make here, because _some group somewhere_ will
| pronounce some word in a certain way, so there can 't
| really be a blanket rule.
| xdennis wrote:
| - English - /'ING(g)lIS/
|
| - engage - /In'geIdZ/, /en'geIdZ/
|
| - engorge - /In'go:dZ/
|
| - engross - /In'gr@Us/, /ING'gr@Us/, /en'groUs/,
| /eNG'groUs/
|
| - engulf - /ING'g^lf/
|
| According to Wiktionary only engulf and engross also use
| /NG/.
| simondotau wrote:
| I've never heard engulf pronounced similarly to English
| int_19h wrote:
| The stress is on a different syllable so it's kinda
| pointless to compare.
| zahlman wrote:
| In my local (dialect and) accent all of these words have
| a pretty clear initial /e/ and not /I/. (But also: /I/
| usually contrasts strongly with /i/ here, but the sound
| before /NG/ is almost a third in-between vowel.)
| o11c wrote:
| Sorry, I was sloppy and wrote /i/ rather than trying to
| dig up how to enter the correct vowel when I was focused
| on the "ng".
| o11c wrote:
| As a native, "toward" is pronounced exactly like "to ward",
| but (usually) with the highly-unstressed vowel variant of
| "to". Remember that "w" is a semivowel, but it's not doing
| anything special here (at least in the vast majority of
| mainstream English dialects). In contexts where it is
| emphasized (or I suppose in more formal registers) it can
| strengthened to merely the normal lack of stress.
|
| English might make more sense if someone actually sat down
| and wrote out the _real_ stress rules, rather than trying
| to cram everything into just "unstressed" and "stressed"
| and only caring within a word.
|
| =====
|
| "To" might be one of the syllables with the most possible
| stress levels, with at least 4 and possible more. As I
| spell them,
|
| 1. "too" - full stress. Common for "two" and "too", but
| possible for "to" under rare circumstances.
|
| 2. "to" - less emphasized but still arguably stressed;
| still has the "proper" vowel. Usually this is as strong as
| "to" gets; "two" and "too" often fall down to this level if
| before a stressed syllable. Arguably this could be split
| into "stressed but near words with even more stress" and
| "unstressed but still enunciated" (which occurs even within
| a register).
|
| 3. "tah/tuh" - unstressed, the vowel mutates toward the
| schwa. Very common for "to", but forbidden in a few
| contexts. May be slightly merged into the _previous_
| syllable. Can we split this?
|
| 4. "t'" - very unstressed vowel has basically disappeared;
| may or may not remain a separate syllable from the one that
| follows (should that be split?).
|
| The infinitive particle can't be 3 (normally 2, not sure if
| 1) if the following verb is implied (but not if the speech
| is cut off). At the start of the sentence it also can't be
| 3, and 1 is possible as seen below though 2 remains the
| default. Note that many common verbs act specially when
| _before_ an infinitive particle; although sometimes treated
| as phrasal verbs it would be silly to treat them as taking
| a bare infinitive as their argument.
|
| Adverbial particle "to" when the phrasal verb takes a
| direct object can be 2 or 3; this likely depends on the
| specific verb it's part of. Note that many people parse
| this as a preposition (taking a prepositional object), but
| this is technically incorrect (though there are some verbs
| where it really is unclear even when doing the
| rearrangement and translation/synonym tests).
|
| Adverbial particle "to" when the phrasal verb does _not_
| have a direct object is usually 2 or even 1 (e.g. in the
| imperative). Some heretics have started calling this a
| preposition too (unfortunately, often in ESL contexts), but
| this should be avoided at all costs; they 're just too
| cowardly to give particles the respect they deserve.
| Probably the only common example in modern English is "come
| to", but there are several others in jargon or archaic
| English.
|
| Particle/preposition (the parsing is arguable) "to" used
| between numbers (range, ratio, exponentiation, time before
| the hour) tends to be 3, especially if one of the numbers
| is a "two". With variables it is slightly more likely to be
| 2.
|
| Preposition "to" meaning "direction", or "contact", or
| "comparison/containment" tends to be 2, but can usually
| fall to 3 (less likely at the start of a sentence, and can
| also be prevented by what precedes it, e.g. "look to" can
| fall to 3 without much effort, but "looked to" strongly
| stays at 2). Contrast with "toward" of related meaning,
| which takes effort to get from 4 to 3.
|
| Preposition "to" meaning "according to", "degree", or
| "target" (including but not limited to the explicit
| expression of an indirect object with most verbs, which we
| could argue should count as a particle instead. If you're
| wondering what verbs are excepted, one is "ask" - it can
| only use "of", as in "ask a question of him") is much more
| strongly 2, and requires significant effort to force it
| down to 3.
|
| Adverb "to" is always 2 I think, but this is rare enough
| that I'm not sure.
|
| =====
|
| "To be or not to be", as famous as it is, has a pretty
| unusual stress pattern for most of its words: full stress
| on the first "to", semi-stress on the first "be", no stress
| (but still full length) on "or" (normal), full stress on
| "not", some stress on the second "to", and some stress on
| the second "be" (more than "to" but less than "not").
| germandiago wrote:
| 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.
| woleium wrote:
| as i understand it, english is actually 3-5 other languages
| in a trench coat.
| devman0 wrote:
| Blame the Normans for that one...well English was already
| kind of a mess, but the the conquest of England by the
| Normans really sealed the deal.
| jcranmer wrote:
| This often gets trotted out, but it's not really true.
| English is a solidly Germanic language, which merely
| happened to lose the core attribute of Indo-European
| languages (extensive verb inflection), and in more recent
| centuries, there's been a tendency to adopt Latin and
| Greek words for new word formation rather than (as German
| did) using native words. So 'technology' instead of
| 'craftlearn' or 'television' instead of 'farsight'.
|
| Even among major languages, English isn't anywhere near
| the worst offender of copulating with other languages for
| features--it never really adopted foreign grammar, the
| way you see with, e.g., Turkic languages.
| kleiba wrote:
| Let's not downplay the influence that the French language
| had on English.
| grey413 wrote:
| As I understand it, English at it's core is a Germanic
| language that underwent significant creolization with
| scandinavian sources. That core then acquired a
| significant amount of Old French and latin vocabulary,
| particularly in upper class terminology.
|
| The creolization is why English has a relatively simple
| grammar, and all the word sources is why we have like
| 16-20 vowel sounds trying to cram into latin characters.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > English has a relatively simple grammar
|
| You mean "relatively simple morphology". English
| phonology and syntax are not simple at all (e.g. lots of
| information carried by word order).
| trchek wrote:
| Solidly Germanic with an absurd amount of French, down to
| nearly identical spelling for many common words. I'm not
| talking about cognates but actually 100% the same
| spelling and meaning and they're often not from some
| recent century but from old French.
|
| I'm sure you have a solid basis for saying this but it's
| basically impossible to write many sentences without by
| accident using French down to the original spelling.
|
| I was going to highlight all the examples I used by
| accident myself in this post but I gave up because the
| links were making it too long.
|
| This is why something like Anglish even exists https://en
| .wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_English
| jason-johnson wrote:
| I believe this is because England was conquered by the
| Normans (french speakers). I think it was within the last
| 100 years or so that the English aristocracy finally
| stopped speaking French among themselves.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > in more recent centuries, there's been a tendency to
| adopt Latin and Greek words for new word formation rather
| than (as German did) using native words
|
| Note that the prevalence of native words in German is the
| result of a modern reform movement, not something that
| happened naturally within the language.
|
| > [English] never really adopted foreign grammar
|
| There's the argument that do-support is borrowed from
| Celtic.
| aeonik wrote:
| At least 3:
|
| ~26% Germanic
|
| ~29% Latin
|
| ~29% French
|
| ~16% Other
|
| RobWords covers this really well:
| https://youtu.be/PCE4C9GvqI0?si=4Wd6NFus4v1YqmC3
| zahlman wrote:
| It seems hard to measure with any kind of objectivity
| here, considering how much Latin is in French (and even
| modern German) as well.
| umanwizard wrote:
| That might be true if you just count up every word in the
| dictionary by origin. However if you weight the words by
| frequency, Germanic will be way higher. That is, if you
| take a transcript of an average conversation in English,
| the proportion of words inherited from Old English (i.e.,
| Germanic) will be much higher than 26%.
| jghn wrote:
| There's a really good podcast [1] that dives into the
| background of English. It starts off even further back,
| talking about PIE and how that affected all the earlier
| languages of the region. And then starts tying the pieces
| together on how English was formed.
|
| [1] https://historyofenglishpodcast.com
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| > Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you
| can read it, you can pronounce it.
|
| is there no accent variation in Spanish?
|
| Such a 1:1 system would never work in English, because the
| way words are pronounced can be very different in e.g.
| Melbourne, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Boston, for example.
| inigoalonso wrote:
| You're right to point out that English pronunciation
| varies widely across regions, but that doesn't fully
| negate the value of a systematic orthography. What
| germandiago is referring to is the relationship between
| graphemes (letters) and phonemes (sounds). Spanish has a
| highly phonemic orthography, meaning the rules for
| converting letters to sounds (and vice versa) are
| consistent and predictable. Yes, there are accentual and
| dialectal variations within Spanish (e.g. seseo in Latin
| America vs. ceceo in parts of Andalusia) but these are
| largely phonological shifts applied systematically, not
| random deviations from spelling norms.
|
| In contrast, English has a deep orthography, where
| historical layers (e.g. Norman French, Old Norse, Latin
| borrowings) and sound changes (like the Great Vowel
| Shift) have led to a chaotic mapping between spelling and
| pronunciation. A consistent system wouldn't eliminate
| dialectal variation, but it could reduce ambiguity and
| aid literacy, as evidenced by languages like Finnish or
| Korean.
| coffeeling wrote:
| I don't know if Korean is ultimately that good. Hangeul
| are a monstrous improvement over the old mixed script
| (which itself is better than the Japanese iteration
| because the Koreans only used Chinese characters for
| Chinese loans), but it still has a lot of sound change
| rules and can be a bit of a pain to read because of how
| letters flow to the next syllable. It's not in the same
| league with Finnish or Spanish, at any rate.
| pxndxx wrote:
| Yeah there are multiple accents in Spanish, but each
| accent is still a 1:1 mapping from written word to
| pronunciation, there's no enough/through/dough nonsense.
| gus_massa wrote:
| For example for a small car ("auto") you say and write:
|
| In Argentina: "autito"
|
| In Colombia: "autico"
|
| In Spain: "autillo"
|
| the same rule applies for all words, not only for cars.
| anthk wrote:
| In Spain you'll listen the three cases at once and all of
| them are perfectly valid.
|
| -ito it's almost the universal way everywhere in the
| Hispanic world.
|
| -ico it's widely used in the South of Navarre and Aragon
| and everyone will understand you. Heck, it's _the_
| diminutive from used by the hick people, and thus, it 's
| uber known, altough you might look like a bumfuck village
| redneck sheepherd with a beret by using -ico outside of
| Navarre/Aragon.
|
| -illo it's more from the South, but, again, understood
| everywhere.
| germandiago wrote:
| One of the problems in english (not the only one, but one
| of them) is that for the vowels there are 5 graphs (is
| this term correct? Sorry but hope it is understandable)
| but many more sounds. In Spanish there are 5 vowels in
| the latin alphabet and exactly five sounds and nothing
| else.
|
| Valencian has 7 sounds though, two for e and two for o.
| Similarly, Catalan also (and in some circumstances the o
| sounds as u, when the stress is not in it and other
| stuff). But they still have quite strict rules.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Yeah but we represent a lot of vowel sounds by combining
| vowels - 5 letters (not including y), if we allow any
| combo of two to represent a different sound that's 25
| combos, and if we remember that preceding and following
| consonants can modify vowels too (though, dough, caught
| bought vs thou, bao, sour, or; on, con, Ron vs how, cow,
| ow) that's quite a lot of combos.
|
| Now, you can (and should!) accuse me of cherry-picking
| examples, since the rules are less consistent and/or
| vastly more complicated than what I represented. But I
| maintain that there are orders of magnitude more ways to
| represent vowel sounds than 5, and the clue is the
| context. Not, as many will suggest, memorizing each
| individual case (though there's certainly plenty of that
| going around, much like Spanish's infamous irregularly
| verb conjugations), but understanding categories and
| families and patterns.
|
| English sounds usually are best understood with groups of
| three letters, rather than one letter at a time. If you
| looks at throuples, you'll likely find far more of that
| consistency we all so deeply desire.
| gwd wrote:
| My son's first year teacher said (I may have the numbers
| slightly wrong) that Spanish has 23 phonemes (sounds the
| mouth makes) and 23 graphemes (ways to write sounds).
| English, on the other hand, has 43 phonemes and over 500
| graphemes.
| decimalenough wrote:
| Spanish is better than English, but it's nowhere near
| that regular. There are three different ways to pronounce
| "x", wild dialectal variations in "ll" and "c", etc.
| germandiago wrote:
| The dialects I can buy it but I think the x has only two
| ways? It is a very regular language from the point of
| view of the written mapping to sound.
| umanwizard wrote:
| _x_ is pronounced four different ways in Spanish: like
| _j_ in _Mexico_ , like the English "sh" in _Xcaret_ ,
| like _s_ in _xenofobia_ and like English "x" in
| _extremo_.
|
| The first two are not productive now in normal Spanish
| words: they are only used in old spellings that have
| irregularly been retained, and in loanwords from
| indigenous languages. But they do exist.
| germandiago wrote:
| Well, yes. I was speaking about standard Spanish from
| Spain.
|
| Xenofobia is an s, yes, and excursion is "ks" In fsct,
| Mejico is the traditional way to write Mexico in Spanish
| grom Spain until it was accepted the other form a few
| years ago. I still write "Mejico" myself.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Since less than 10% of Spanish speakers are from Spain,
| there's no reason to assume you were specifically talking
| about that one country when referring to the Spanish
| language in general.
|
| And anyway, as you point out, even in Spain the form
| _Mexico_ is accepted now.
| germandiago wrote:
| I thought it is perfectly reasonable to talk about
| spanish from Spsin the same you talk about English from
| England.
|
| After all, it is where they come from originally and have
| their own spelling (colour vs color, etc.)
|
| An x in standard spanish has always been the two sounds I
| told you and that mexican deviation is specific to
| Mexico.
|
| Yes, it is over 100 million speakers but I was still
| assuming the root language in its original place as the
| reference. Sorry if I did not express it correctly.
| umanwizard wrote:
| I get your point, but FWIW, Mexico is not a Mexican
| deviation; it's just an older Spanish spelling. E.g.
| Jimenez was once spelled Ximenez and there are probably
| lots of other examples.
|
| The "root language spoken in its original place"
| absolutely did pronounce X like modern J.
| MarceColl wrote:
| The rules are very clear on when those are used though,
| you are not really arguing the original point imo. What
| are the dialectical variations in "ll" and "c"?
| daeken wrote:
| (B2-ish Spanish learner here but) "ll" is pronounced in
| at least three variants that I know of: "y", "j", and
| something between "sh" and "ch". E.g. "llama" might be
| pronounced like (in English writing) "yama", "zhama", or
| "shama". The last one really threw me for a while; it's
| super common in Argentina at least.
| germandiago wrote:
| I see what you mean. I think you should stick to one form
| and learn by difference or you could quickly get lost.
|
| "ll" in standard spanish is a strong english "y".
|
| However, in spanish argentinian from the area of Buenos
| Aires (but not the argentinian Cordoba, which sounds more
| like colombian spanish) it is "sh", being that s
| something like a mix in-between of "j" and "s" + h as in
| "she" but the sound is a bit different.
|
| Without being able to record some sound I cannot express
| it better but I am sure you can find something around.
| Javier Milei, the president, has such an accent.
| nwatson wrote:
| I spent time in the "Rio de la Plata" area in the late
| 1970s, mainly Montevideo, and learned rioplatense
| Spanish, and would use the ZH sound as in "meaSure" for
| Y/LL letters in "playa" and "calle".
|
| In the last 40 years I've spent mostly in the USA I
| rarely have heard Uruguayan/Argentinian Spanish in person
| or in media, but was surprised to hear Messi and others
| in recent interviews use SH as in "puSH" for the Y/LL,
| this apparent has been a generational shift in that area,
| first in Argentina and then Uruguay. I'd sound old-
| fashioned if I were to go back to Montevideo these days.
| int_19h wrote:
| AFAIK "ll" can also be the palatalized "l" sound in some
| dialects, i.e. in the same relationship to regular "l" as
| "n" is to "n". Indeed, this is the original pronunciation
| from which all others have diverged.
| gwd wrote:
| I think that must have been _within one dialect_. If you
| include all dialects of English (Scottish, Irish,
| Australian, Singaporian, Indian, American, etc. etc.) I
| 'm sure you have a lot more than 43 phonemes.
|
| In any case, her point wasn't to give a lecture on
| linguistics, but to impress upon the parents how
| complicated English really is to learn to read.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| Dialects are different since they are still internally
| consistent.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| Spanish "maps" very nicely but even Spanish isn't exactly
| 1:1
|
| - /k/ can be written both c and qu, and k where it
| occasionally appears in the language (e.g. kilo) - and
| the u in qu is silent.
|
| - /s/ can be written c, s, and z, though stress rules are
| different for c and z.
|
| - r and rr are distinct sounds but r = rr at the
| beginning of words, I think.
|
| - At least in Mexican Spanish: The "ua" sound can be
| spelled ua or oa (e.g. Michoacan, Oaxaca) - and also the
| breathy sound of j can also be written with an x.
|
| - d has a sound a little like English voiced-th at the
| end of words (e.g. juventud)
| anthk wrote:
| Not an issue with /s/ in Iberian Spanish. Once you have
| 'distincion', most ortography errors I've read overseas
| plummet down there.
| int_19h wrote:
| > phonemes (sounds the mouth makes)
|
| This isn't entirely correct. A distinct sound that the
| mouth makes is a "phone". A phoneme is almost always a
| group of several phones - allophones - that native
| language speakers perceive as a single sound. Another way
| to phrase it is that if you change one phoneme to another
| one, it makes a different word (possibly a non-existing
| one, but regardless the native speakers would consider it
| distinct), but changing from one phone to another doesn't
| change the word.
|
| For example, in English, the phoneme /t/ has allophones
| [t], [tk], [r], or [?] depending on context. OTOH [r] is
| a distinct phoneme in Spanish, and [?] is a distinct
| phoneme in Arabic.
|
| Unfortunately these two are often confused, so one should
| be careful with such counts and comparing them - it's not
| uncommon when people count phonemes in their native
| language, but phones in other languages (when those
| phones sound distinct to them).
|
| This can also vary significantly from dialect to dialect,
| since one very common thing in language evolution is for
| two similar phonemes to collapse into a single one while
| retaining the original distinction as allophones. For
| English, in particular, the number of phonemes varies _a
| lot_ between American and British English (with the
| latter having more distinctions).
| diogolsq wrote:
| Portuguese and German are like that.
|
| You've never seen the word before, but when reading it for
| the first time, you'll probably pronounce it correctly.
|
| English is awful, but French takes the crown on this one--
| though more because it has the same pronunciation for many
| different words and written forms.
|
| English, on the other hand, the alphabet doesn't map well.
|
| Mood and flood both have "oo", yet each is pronounced
| differently. You need to know the word beforehand to know
| exactly how it's pronounced.
| beAbU wrote:
| I've only really been exposed to French in music, where
| I've sung various French pieces of the years. But from my
| experience, at least French is consistent? As-written is
| as-pronounced.
|
| Is this not really the case, and therefore is French also
| guilty of having the same vowels/consonants pronounced
| differently for completely arb reasons?
| germandiago wrote:
| Or live and live, read and read (past participle), or
| castle (the t is mute) or bear, beard, the ea is
| different.
|
| I do not want to be offensive, there are lots more , but
| it is an amazing sh*tshow the mapping.
| lelandfe wrote:
| If you think castle is bad, wait till you hear forecastle
| ("fok-sul")
| germandiago wrote:
| Hahaha. I was not aware of that one. Yes, looks like
| undecipherable.
| stockresearcher wrote:
| A lot of nautical terms have unusual pronunciations.
| English sailors primarily came from coastal regions, and
| were very happy to have a lingo that was incomprehensible
| to the landsman. All of this carried over to North
| America as well.
| int_19h wrote:
| At least that's often spelled "fo'c'sle" these days,
| which gives you a good idea of the actual pronunciation.
|
| My personal favorite in English is "colonel" being
| pronounced the same as "kernel". Which is insane even
| from an etymological perspective because the word is a
| derivative of "column" (as in, a colonel is someone who
| commands/leads a column of soldiers).
| umanwizard wrote:
| French is a lot less bad than English in this regard. In
| French you can usually (though not always) predict how a
| word is pronounced from its spelling, but not vice versa.
| In English, both directions are impossible.
| johnisgood wrote:
| French is not a good example. Pronunciation often
| deviates from spelling in French (e.g. many silent
| letters and inconsistent mappings).
|
| Hungarian, however, is pronounced the way it is written,
| as its orthographic type is phonemic, whereas French and
| English are of type deep orthography.
|
| Serbian is of the perfectly phonemic type. "Write as you
| speak, read as it is written" is a common saying.
| coffeeling wrote:
| The silent letters are not the point - that's why the
| poster you replied to said it doesn't work
| speech->writing in French. But writing->speech is much,
| much more consistent than in English, even if the
| orthography itself is kinda criminal with all the silent
| letters and whatnot.
| Toorkit wrote:
| Fritteuse.
| pmontra wrote:
| Yes, I'll always remember the long time spent asking for
| the whereabouts of Ocean Drive, mispronounced by me because
| the correct pronunciation would require the word to be
| written as Oshean or maybe Oshan. It was 1995. I have had
| very few occasions to hear native speakers. A lot of people
| and I were figuring out plausible but incorrect
| pronunciations by applying the most usual pronunciation
| rules to the written words.
| zajio1am wrote:
| > Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you
| can read it, you can pronounce it.
|
| IMHO purely phonemic orthography makes orthography
| unnecessary complex, as there are language features like
| assimilation[1] that happens naturally in spoken form but
| does not make sense in written form.
|
| In contrast, morphophonemic orthography keeps systematic
| and consistent mapping between spoken and written form for
| individual morphemes, but not necessary for words, as in
| written form morphemes are just concatenated (to make
| words), while in spoken form there may be complex
| interactions.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation_(linguistics)
| gus_massa wrote:
| It's not so strict, but we try most time to keep it
| consistent. For example, here in Buenos Aires we almost
| don't say the "d" at the end of the word, like in
| "ciudad" (city), in some pronunciation guides I saw it
| written with a tiny d.
|
| If the variant get's too popular the two versions become
| the official spelling, for example "septiembre" and
| "setiembre" (September) are correct. I hate the second
| one and I never use it, but it's popular somewhere. After
| many years, sometime the old spelling disappears and is
| marked as archaic.
| germandiago wrote:
| Strictly speaking, spanish has the same sound for v and
| b, unlike other romance languages. G and j when followed
| by e or i also.
| pitpatagain wrote:
| This is true, but Spanish orthography isn't completely
| phonemic (and simpler for it). It is very shallow and
| very consistent but it doesn't spell out things like
| assimilation differences, people are just wrong to
| describe it as completely phonemic.
| int_19h wrote:
| An orthography that surfaces (non-phonemic) assimilation
| would be phonetic rather than phonemic. For example, many
| languages assimilate "n" to "m" before "b", but the
| phoneme is still /n/, and native speakers are often not
| even aware that this assimilation occurs (which is what
| indicates that it's still the same phoneme).
| wredcoll wrote:
| 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?!
| jcranmer wrote:
| A few plausible answers to that:
|
| In general, it's not transliteration into English
| characters, it's transliteration into the Latin alphabet.
| That means that transliteration tends to be shared across
| the various European languages that use the Latin alphabet.
| And given that the English were one of the last powers to
| actually engage in the naval trade war, they're less likely
| to be the basis of a major transliteration effort.
|
| In the case of the q and x, I believe it comes from
| 500-year old Portuguese.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > That means that transliteration tends to be shared
| across the various European languages that use the Latin
| alphabet
|
| Not just European languages. Pinyin is useful for
| everyone that has to interact with Chinese words, whether
| their first language is English, French, Swahili, or even
| Mandarin.
|
| A lot of people might not realize that the primary users
| of Pinyin are Chinese people. The way typing Chinese
| works is that you type the pronunciation in Pinyin and
| then a box pops up with choices of characters from which
| you select the correct one. It's also used in
| dictionaries to give the pronunciation of unfamiliar
| characters.
| paulmooreparks wrote:
| It's best not to think of Hanyu Pinyin as using "English
| characters" to pronounce Mandarin. It's just a mapping of
| the initial, medial, and final sounds onto the Latin
| alphabet in a consistent way, so that once you know the
| mapping, you know the pronunciation right away, and more
| practically, you can _type_ it right away.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| I used to always think these romanization schemes were
| really bad, until I realized they were just not _for_ me.
| The ease of sight-reading and getting the correct
| pronunciation for a random english speaker is not the
| goal. It 's primarily for the convenience of users of
| other languages to have a systematic encoding. To make it
| pronunciation-friendly you would have to have to add a
| bunch of complexity to the mapping that would compromise
| its usage by the real audience.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Who called them "english characters"?
|
| Pinyin uses s in a very common way, z in the way of
| Italian, and c more or less in the manner of various Slavic
| languages. They are a sequence of related sounds: s is the
| fricative, z is affricated, and c is both affricated and
| aspirated.
|
| Sh, zh, and ch are a sequence of sounds related to s, z,
| and c. Sh is a fricative articulated farther back in the
| mouth, zh is its affricated form, and ch is both affricated
| and aspirated.
|
| And as a bonus, sh and ch match English usage, which isn't
| likely to have been a primary concern.
|
| It's also worth noting that for many Chinese speakers,
| there is no difference between s/sh, z/zh, or c/ch.
|
| (x, j, and q are what you get if you use the middle of your
| tongue, instead of the tip, to pronounce sh/zh/ch. They
| occur before front vowels; sh/zh/ch only appear before back
| (or central) vowels.)
|
| A friend of mine remarked to me once that when she was in
| school, her teacher informed the class that English
| speakers would not understand what the pinyin letter "q"
| was supposed to mean, which I immediately confirmed. She
| thought this was hilarious.
| ZSHARD wrote:
| The English are definitely characters.
| gwd wrote:
| Pinyin was written by Chinese speakers for Chinese
| speakers. There are other romanizations written by
| westerners, and these are easier to see where the sounds
| come from; e.g., "tsai" rather than "cai".
|
| What use is "q" as a letter at all in English? It makes a
| "k" sound and _always_ occurs with a "u" after it. Why not
| use it for the "tch" sound? (Which, btb, is different than
| the "ch" sound.)
|
| "C" is about the same -- by itself it always sounds exactly
| like "k" or "s". Why not use it for the "ts" sound?
|
| As for "zhou" -- in English, z is very similar to an s, but
| voiced. So in pinyin, zh is just like ch, but voiced.
|
| Lots of languages do this BTW. When people from Wycliffe
| want to translate a Bible into an obscure language without
| a writing system, they first have to invent a writing
| system. They could invent all new characters, but why? All
| it would do is make that language hard to type. So they
| take the sounds that language has, and map them onto Latin
| characters. Sometimes there's an obvious mapping, sometimes
| not.
|
| Look up Welsh's spelling for another example of this.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Why not use it for the "tch" sound? (Which, btb, is
| different than the "ch" sound.)
|
| What are you thinking of? There is no difference between
| those things.
|
| But your major point here is correct; on the fundamentals
| there is no reason for the English alphabet to feature a
| Q.
|
| > "C" is about the same -- by itself it always sounds
| exactly like "k" or "s". Why not use it for the "ts"
| sound?
|
| With the modern alphabet there's no reason for a C
| either. However, the answer to "why not use it for the
| 'ts' sound" is pretty obvious - that sound isn't part of
| the English phonemic inventory. It occurs, but that is
| almost always just a result of what is supposed to be a
| bare /t/ being followed by /s/ for grammatical reasons.
| (For an example of the general feeling here, note that an
| English word cannot start with /ts/ at all.) Why would we
| use any letter to represent the "ts" sound? We represent
| it the same way it exists in our language, as a sequence
| of two unrelated sounds.
|
| > So in pinyin, zh is just like ch, but voiced.
|
| Technically the only voiced consonants in pinyin are m /
| n / ng / l / r. I think a voicing contrast was present in
| Middle Chinese, and there's one today in Shanghainese and
| presumably other Wu dialects, but not in Mandarin.
| gwd wrote:
| > What are you thinking of? There is no difference
| between those things.
|
| I'm talking about pinyin here. In Mandarin, there are to
| distinct sounds, one represented in pinyin by 'q', and
| one by 'ch'. It took me months to hear the difference,
| and months more to be able to pronounce them properly. I
| think there are other romanizations where the 'q' sound
| is represented "tch".
|
| (In fact, I'm inclined to think that there are _actually_
| two different sounds in English as well; "witch" and
| "Charlie" don't feel the same in my mouth.)
|
| > Technically the only voiced consonants in pinyin are m
| / n / ng / l / r.
|
| I think we're using different definitions of "voiced".
| Other voiced / unvoiced pairs in English include g/k,
| b/p, v/f, z/s. See [1] for an "official" example of
| "voiced" being used the way I'm using it.
|
| How else would you describe the difference between "qu"
| and "ju", or "chou" and "zhou"? The only difference I can
| feel is when your vocal cords turn on.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plosive#Voice
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > In fact, I'm inclined to think that there are actually
| two different sounds in English as well; "witch" and
| "Charlie" don't feel the same in my mouth.
|
| There aren't.
|
| > I think there are other romanizations where the 'q'
| sound is represented "tch".
|
| Well, maybe; there are a large number of romanizations of
| Mandarin. But there are no significant romanizations
| where that is true. It's _q_ in pinyin, _ch '_ in Wade-
| Giles, and _ts '_ or _k '_ in postal romanization.
|
| > How else would you describe the difference between "qu"
| and "ju", or "chou" and "zhou"? The only difference I can
| feel is when your vocal cords turn on.
|
| You could read my other comment in the thread. qu and
| chou are aspirated; ju and zhou aren't. Your vocal cords
| don't turn on at different points for those syllables.
| Mandarin Chinese doesn't use voicing contrasts.
|
| > I think we're using different definitions of "voiced".
| Other voiced / unvoiced pairs in English include g/k,
| b/p, v/f, z/s. See [1] for an "official" example of
| "voiced" being used the way I'm using it.
|
| Yes, I know what voicing is. You don't seem to know what
| consonants are used in Mandarin.
|
| Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese_ph
| onology#Con... .
| gwd wrote:
| > qu and chou are aspirated; ju and zhou aren't.
| ...Compare [ref]
|
| So the idea here is that chou and zhou are related in a
| similar way that the t's in "top" and "stop" are related:
| your mouth and vocal cords are doing the same thing, but
| in one case you have the puff of air and the other you
| don't.
|
| At any rate, going back to the original question: the
| logic behind the choice is still consistent. On this
| classification, in Mandarin, p and t and ch are
| aspirated, and in English p and t and ch are voiceless; b
| and d and j and zh are unaspirated, and in English b and
| d and j and z are voiced. (And q is mainly thrown in to
| fill the gap, but its pronunciation in English is
| voiceless as well.)
|
| Or, to explicitly quote from the ref you shared:
|
| > Such pairs [of aspirated and unaspirated plosives and
| fricatives] are represented in the pinyin system mostly
| using letters which in Romance languages generally denote
| voiceless/voiced pairs (for example [p] and [b]).
| int_19h wrote:
| Languages usually have either the voiced/unvoiced
| distinction as phonemic, or the aspirated/unaspirated
| distinction. In the former case unvoiced consonants often
| have aspirated allophones as in English, and in the
| latter case unaspirated consonants often have voiced
| allophones especially between vowels, as in Chinese or
| Korean. Hence why it makes sense to map the two in this
| manner - if your native language uses aspiration as the
| primary feature, and you hear someone who uses voicing,
| your brain will generally map it "automatically" for you,
| and their speech will sound weird but understandable.
|
| (But then you get Hindi with a four-way distinction, both
| voiced/unvoiced and aspirated/unaspirated in all possible
| combinations.)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > But then you get Hindi with a four-way distinction,
| both voiced/unvoiced and aspirated/unaspirated in all
| possible combinations.
|
| They're _spelled_ that way; I don 't think they're
| supposed to be pronounced that way.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant#Voiced_
| con...
|
| >> True aspirated voiced consonants, as opposed to
| murmured (breathy-voice) consonants such as the [bh],
| [dh], [gh] that are common among the languages of India,
| are extremely rare.
|
| > Languages usually have either the voiced/unvoiced
| distinction as phonemic, or the aspirated/unaspirated
| distinction.
|
| My understanding is that all of these options are fairly
| common:
|
| - two-way contrast between aspirated and unaspirated
|
| - two-way contrast between voiced and voiceless
|
| - three-way contrast between voiceless aspirated,
| voiceless, and voiced
|
| - three-way contrast for labial and alveolar stops; two-
| way contrast for velar stops
| Kolya wrote:
| The article you linked to specifically says there are
| only voiceless plosives in Mandarin!
| gwd wrote:
| And, you'll notice I pointed out English voiced plosives.
| :-D
| vrc wrote:
| Wait til you get a load of Tamil/Malayalam
| transliterations' use of "zh". It was proposed by some
| German linguist to represent a really retroflex "r" and now
| makes outsiders pronounce kozhikode as "cozy-code" instead
| a closer "korikode"
| umanwizard wrote:
| Your first question, who thought of the system, has a
| straight answer. From Wikipedia:
|
| > Hanyu Pinyin was designed by a group of mostly Chinese
| linguists, including Wang Li, Lu Zhiwei, Li Jinxi, Luo
| Changpei, as well as Zhou Youguang (1906-2017), an
| economist by trade, as part of a Chinese government project
| in the 1950s.
|
| By the way, they are not "English" characters; they are
| Latin/Roman characters, and used in a huge number of
| languages with different spelling conventions. Pinyin was
| created for the entire world to use, not specifically
| English speakers.
| int_19h wrote:
| How would you spell that sound in a way that is
| consistently recognized?
|
| "zh" is actually one of the more reasonable pinyin digraphs
| because it follows the same pattern as "sh". If "s" + "h"
| results in [S], then logically "z" + "h" should result in
| [Z].
|
| "c" is used the way pinyin uses it in many languages (e.g.
| pretty much all Slavic ones that use the Latin alphabet,
| for starters).
|
| "x" and "q" are more questionable, but there's precedent
| for either in languages using Latin-based alphabets - "x"
| can be [S] in Spanish, for example, and "q" is [cc] in
| Albanian.
| yeasku wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Turning 'ti' to /S/ is a fairly normal affricatization
|
| It can't be an affrication, because /S/ is not an affricate.
| (Although /tj/ _is_ affricated, as /tS/ [think "gotcha"] -
| when you say 'ti', you're referring to words that were
| pronounced with /s/ rather than /t/.)
|
| Wouldn't /sj/ -> /S/ usually just be called "palatalization"?
|
| (The specific phenomenon in the context of English appears to
| be called "yod-coalescence".)
| jjav wrote:
| > 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!
| watwut wrote:
| > But, french is much worse!
|
| Nah. Having learned both, French is easier in this regard.
| It is not as random, it has rules they work most of the
| time.
| gottorf wrote:
| French has much stricter rules, but I could see how the
| abundance of silent letters would make a spelling bee
| harder.
| ralferoo wrote:
| French also has some weird gotchas, e.g. "la democratie"
| where the spelling represents the word's root rather than
| pronunciation.
| cm2187 wrote:
| An even worse example is the last name "de Broglie",
| which I think most French natives would likely get wrong
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k45IZDkg2Pg
| d-us-vb wrote:
| I disagree. For whatever reason, most proficient readers I
| know have an intuition about the correct pronunciation of a
| word even if they've never heard it spoken before. And even
| if they use an intuitive pronunciation that isn't identical
| to standard pronunciation, they'll still be understood.
|
| Spelling bee is the opposite direction, going from
| pronunciation to spelling; not a fair comparison.
| Izkata wrote:
| > For whatever reason, most proficient readers I know
| have an intuition about the correct pronunciation of a
| word even if they've never heard it spoken before.
|
| Because pronunciation rules exist, they're just never
| explicitly taught and instead learned through exposure.
| For example, here's someone reconstructing as many of the
| rules as they can: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html
| eythian wrote:
| Dutch, which has a pretty reasonable sound-to-orthography
| mapping (some exceptions of course, but not all that many)
| also has spelling bees. Often won by the Belgians.
| dadoum wrote:
| According to this paper [0] and my own experience, it's way
| easier to pronounce a word in French given the spelled word
| than in English. It's slightly harder to spell French than
| English for the model of the study, but it's really close.
| Now, in my personal experience, I feel like French has a
| lot of rules while English has a lot of outliers which do
| not follow any rules. But my native language is French, so
| I am obviously biased.
|
| [0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.13321
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Yeah as far as I know, in French words are always
| pronounced consistent with how they're spelled. The same
| is not true in English. Americans complain a lot about
| french spellings '-ioux', 'eau', etc. but they offer no
| gripe over the difference between '-ough' in 'enough' vs
| 'through'.
|
| French is funny to me because the written language and
| the spoken language are in some ways quite different,
| with written french introducing considerable complexity.
| aller, allait, allais, allaient, allee, etc. Since the
| spoken context for all the conjugations is almost always
| clear, I'm not sure why someone introduced the extra
| complexity.
| dmurray wrote:
| > Yeah as far as I know, in French words are always
| pronounced consistent with how they're spelled.
|
| It's far from as bad as English, but here's a Reddit
| thread with lots of French words which are not spelt as
| they are written. Not esoteric words either; along the
| lines of _hier_ and _monsieur_
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/French/comments/1269a2x/is_there
| _a_...
| foobarian wrote:
| South Slavic languages have 1-1 mappings thanks to an
| engineer in disguise [1]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karad%C5%BEi%C4%87#Lingui
| s...
| int_19h wrote:
| It's really not that hard. Some other examples of the
| same include Belarusian (albeit with Cyrillic alphabet)
| and Finnish.
| arkh wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That's two exact opposite things.
|
| Languages for which you know how to pronounce a word just
| from its written form => you can have spelling bee
| competition there.
|
| Languages for which you know how to write a word when you
| hear it pronounced => no spelling bee competition.
|
| I'll take French as an example : if you see "o", "au",
| "eau" in a word you know how to pronounce it. There is one
| and only way. But if you hear "o" in a word then good luck
| knowing how to write it. So you got dictees (spelling bees)
| even if you can easily guess how a written word sounds
| like. The existence of spelling bee competition in the
| English world is not proof that the language written word
| pronunciation are a guess.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I would expect that spelling bees would select words that
| are not phonetically spelled. This selection bias does not
| imply that English does not have productive pronunciation
| rules.
| goalieca wrote:
| English is a particularly challenging language to spell with.
| How many languages have a national spelling competition?
| taeric wrote:
| 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.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| At least one really obvious way to know that English is a
| phonetic language: fantasy authors create all sorts of made
| up names in their books. Sure, _sometimes_ there are
| disagreements over how to pronounce these names, but
| generally readers come up with quite similar
| pronunciations.
| palmfacehn wrote:
| The confusion may come from the various spelling
| conventions in the numerous loan words. In many of the
| counterintuitive cases, you could imagine a more phonetic
| spelling. The tradition has been to preserve buffet as
| is, instead of rewriting it as, "buffay".
|
| The distinction is there. English can be used
| phonetically. We prefer to preserve the heritage of
| various loan words instead.
| dinfinity wrote:
| Eh. Only _sometimes_.
|
| Hearing Americans pronounce the French loanword 'niche'
| as 'nitch' instead of 'neesh' is cringe-inducing.
|
| English pronunciation is just kind of a mess (especially
| in the US). It is one of the few languages where highly
| educated mature people are regularly unsure of how to
| pronounce a word in their own language or where there is
| no agreed upon 'non-dialect'/standard pronunciation.
| wmgries wrote:
| Some Americans clearly must do this, but personally, I've
| never heard this in my life until I saw it on a YouTube
| video of a British person complaining how Americans
| pronounce words. Obviously, your experience may vary -
| it's a big country.
| palmfacehn wrote:
| The transatlantic dispute over "aluminum/aluminium" seems
| minor when you consider how English is used globally.
| Even within Britain, there are considerable variations.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglosphere#/media/File:Ang
| los...
| tracker1 wrote:
| The one that gets me, as an American is nuclear vs
| nucular. Both have been in use verbally and written for
| decades... academics have adopted the former, even if the
| latter was more common in most early use. And that's just
| one, pretty recent example.
| dtech wrote:
| I'd argue that is mostly because 1) people follow
| audiobook or TV series pronunciations and 2) most
| discussions happen online and not in verbal form.
|
| This is definitely a problem when it surfaces. For
| example the Stormlight Archive [1] series has two voice
| actors narrating the audiobook, and they don't even agree
| between them how to pronounce half the made up names.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stormlight_Archive
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| As someone who has listened to The Stormlight Archive
| (and The Wheel of Time with the same two narrators), the
| differences are absolutely there, but they're relatively
| small.
|
| Fantasy novels predate the widespread popularity of
| audiobooks. It used to be quite expensive to distribute a
| large enough volume of audio. The old "books on tape"
| cost a lot of money, were frequently abridged, and only
| existed for the most popular titles.
| jawilson2 wrote:
| "It's pronounced Jandalf!"
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't think he could be taken seriously with a name
| like Yandalf.
| dctoedt wrote:
| Reminiscent of a tweet about the death of the inventor of
| the GIF, who reportedly said it should be pronounced
| "jif" -- the retweeter's comment was, "I guess he's with
| Jod."
|
| https://twitter.com/andylevy/status/1506748105735159818
| (not there anymore; maybe the account holder ditched
| Twitter)
| throw7 wrote:
| cue GIF pronunciation war.
| coev wrote:
| It's not pronounced "jraphics interchange format",
| therefore hard G
| cobbaut wrote:
| And yet it is gif like in gin and giraffe...
| pif wrote:
| > English is not a phonetic language.
|
| Whoever says that English is a phonetic language does not
| know what a phonetic language is.
|
| The property that characterizes a phonetic language is that
| you can properly pronounce a written word that you know
| nothing about.
| taeric wrote:
| Counter point, anyone that claims English isn't a
| phonetic language doesn't know what a logographic writing
| system is. Or what a gesture language is.
| pif wrote:
| I'm not stating that English is anything like that. Just
| that it is not phonetic, in the sense that the written
| form of a word is not sufficient to pronounce it
| correctly.
| taeric wrote:
| That isn't what that means, though. It is not regular, it
| is phonetic. Indeed, your argument that there is
| confusion in spelling is because it is phonetic, but not
| regular. You know the letters in "glasses" correspond to
| sounding out something. In contrast to something like an
| emoji, :glasses:, which you don't.
| pif wrote:
| I have to agree with you. With respect to emojis, English
| is phonetic. But this statement is as stretched as
| considering a diesel guzzling truck green because the
| fuel it burns was indeed created using solar energy.
| taeric wrote:
| No it isn't. Pedantically, English the language is
| definitionally phonetic, as it is spoken. Sign language
| is not phonetic, nor are things like smoke
| signals/traffic signals/etc.
|
| Just as it would be silly to claim that Japanese is not
| phonetic. Of course spoken Japanese is phonetic. They
| even have two fully regular alphabets that can both
| express the same phonemes, but are used for different
| reasons. As well, they have a completely logographic set
| that does not relate to phonemes, even though it is used
| for most writing.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| We're discussing features of _written_ language (
| "phonetic" -- or the etymologically related
| "phonological") is a way of categorizing writing systems
| by their relationship to spoken language.
|
| > Of course spoken Japanese is phonetic
|
| "Phonetic" is not a feature of spoken language, but of
| the relation between other language forms (usually,
| written, but you could make the same distinction for,
| say, sign languages) and spoken language.
|
| > They even have two fully regular alphabets
|
| I assume from "two fully regular" you are referring to
| hiragana and katakana, but those are syllabaries, not
| alphabets. (Romaji is an alphabetic system, though, but I
| don't know where you'd find a second one.)
| taeric wrote:
| Phonetic is absolutely a feature linked to spoken
| languages, though? It quite literally is relating to
| spoken sounds. Sign language, for example, is not
| phonetic, as many users of it cannot speak or hear.
|
| Fair that I should have said they have two phonetic
| writing systems, decidedly not alphabets. I'm not sure
| the distinction is one that matters for what we are
| covering here?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Phonetic is absolutely a feature linked to spoken
| languages, though?
|
| It's a feature _linked to_ spoken languages, since it is
| a feature of the relation of non-spoken (usually written)
| language _to_ a spoken language.
|
| But it is not a feature _of_ a spoken language.
|
| > Sign language, for example, is not phonetic, as many
| users of it cannot speak or hear.
|
| Yes, in causal terms, the fact many users of sign
| languages aren't familiar with the sounds of the spoken
| language is a reason sign languages tend not be phonetic,
| but they are not phonetic in definitional terms because
| the symbols in the sign language do not _represent_ the
| sounds of spoken language.
|
| But it would make no sense to call a spoken language
| phonetic (except maybe if it was a code for a _different_
| spoken language, in which the phonemes in one mapped to
| the individual phonemes, rather than ideas, of the
| other.)
| taeric wrote:
| It absolutely is a feature of spoken languages. It is in
| contrast to vocalizations, specifically because it is
| about speech and not just the sounds animals can make.
|
| I get what you are aiming at, but phonetics is about
| speech. Is why you can reliably say how many phonemes
| different languages have. If you had to cover all
| vocalizations that people could do, you would have a bit
| more trouble.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| "phonetics" is about speech, but the noun "phonetics" is
| not the adjective "phonetic" as applied to a language.
| "phonetic" is not a modifier that applies to spoken
| language (with the hypothetical caveat I gave upthread),
| and even if it was, it would have a different definition
| than the one that applies to non-spoken language and is
| about the relation such a language has to a spoken
| language, so trying to redirect to it in a discussion of
| that use of the adjective "phonetic" would be
| equivocation, argumentative conflation of different
| definitions of the same word.
| taeric wrote:
| It is hard for me to read this. You seem to have given up
| on capital letters. And sentences. I don't like
| criticizing run-on sentences as being indicative of bad
| thinking; but I do literally feel you grasping here.
|
| I'm largely comfortable with the idea that there is
| something lacking in the orthography of English. Fully
| comfortable, even. I'm growing frustrated with how many
| are pushing the idea that it is not phonetic. The system
| is literally to convey, in writing, the words that you
| would speak in English. And the word "phonetic" captures
| that perfectly.
|
| If you want to argue that we are building a new use of
| the word "phonetic" applied to writing that supersedes
| "orthography" and related terms. You do you. It still
| seems nonsensical to me and only works if you ignore that
| we have an alphabet that is literally used to convey
| speech sounds.
| pif wrote:
| The issue at the start of the conversation is not about
| speaking or gesturing. It is about using the Latin
| alphabet properly (i.e. phonetically, as it was designed)
| or "with some imagination" as the English does.
| taeric wrote:
| The alphabet is used to communicate the spoken words. Not
| the concepts or something else, literally the spoken
| words. Is a big part of why slang is so popular in
| fiction settings, as they would use the letter to convey
| pronunciation. Because the letters generally represent
| phonemes.
| pif wrote:
| > but not regular.
|
| There is "not being regular" and there is "not even
| trying, and getting it right by a stroke of luck from
| time to time".
| bluGill wrote:
| English is more phonetic than not. There are a lot of
| words where it isn't clear what is the correct
| pronunciation, but if you put a random sequence of
| letters together there are only a few possible
| pronunciations, often exactly one.
|
| I wish English was more phonetic. Spelling and
| pronunciations is a mess. However the language is mostly
| phonetic.
| pif wrote:
| There's something you speakers of non-phonetic languages
| cannot fully grasp, I'm afraid!
|
| We Italians, when we were children, we were taught to
| read based on the written letters, and we were able to
| read _any_ word. It was normal, during primary school, to
| pronounce a word correctly and then ask the teacher what
| it meant. This is something you can not do in English.
|
| And the converse was true as well! An Italian child is
| able to hear the surname of a new acquaintance, or the
| name of the village they are from, and write it down
| properly. In Italian, the question "How do you spell it?"
| does not make any sense! Again, this is something you can
| not do in English. Nor can you do it in French, because
| in the past centuries they had ink to spare and as such
| they started writing down useless letters that they do
| not pronounce.
| bcatanzaro wrote:
| Yes, but Italy had to centralize its language in order to
| accomplish this. 1000 Italian dialects were suppressed in
| a very heavyweight process. (And probably some people
| didn't like speaking Florentine, which became modern
| Italian.)
|
| English is complicated because it's decentralized and
| there is no authority to regularize it. Which is a
| feature, not a bug.
| pif wrote:
| You are wrong on several levels.
|
| 1 - Being fluent in the national language does not
| prevent people from maintaining their dialects in
| parallel.
|
| 2 - Whether a language is phonetic has no relation to
| political issues concerning dialects.
|
| 3 - Whether a language is phonetic has no relation to
| whether people like to use it.
|
| 4 - English got decentralized starting with the Age of
| Sail, but the lack of correspondence between written and
| oral forms is systemic and older than that.
| bluGill wrote:
| being fluent in a language makes you less likely to be
| interested in a second when everyone speaks the first.
| This plays out over generations in killing the less
| common languages.
| hbn wrote:
| You can frequently do that in English too. Of course
| there are exceptions, but if anything it's typically
| because of words/names from other languages.
|
| In my experience learning Spanish, their loan words are
| Spanish-ized, being made to be pronounced and spelled in
| a format that makes more sense in Spanish. Whereas in
| English, the pronunciation and spelling is usually taken
| more directly from the source, so you get a bunch of
| instances where a word's spelling doesn't really match
| its pronunciation.
| thechao wrote:
| I think you're trying to to argue something like: "the
| set of dialects that make up English have a large(r?) set
| of allowable IPA orthographic representations than the
| accepted set of English orthographies" or something to
| that effect? And, that, perhaps, Spanish (French?
| Ukrainian?) have a much smaller set of alternate IPA
| orthographies for a given acceptable orthography?
|
| I guess I'm really confused. It's not like English is
| some Arabic language where the orthography is in a second
| nearly unintelligible languages? Or, Chinese or Egyptian
| hieroglyphs... ?
| pif wrote:
| > I think you're trying to to argue something like:
|
| I'm arguing exactly what I wrote: a phonetic language is
| one when you can see a written word and pronounce it
| correctly, _without_ knowing what it means and _without_
| having ever heard it before.
|
| Edit - as an example, consider "door" and "pool": the
| written form is not sufficient to guess the sound to
| associate to the double o.
| thechao wrote:
| Which language is phonetic? I think you're beating around
| the bush here; you claim English _isn 't_ phonetic, but
| which language _is_?
| codethief wrote:
| Spanish and Italian are.
| bvrmn wrote:
| blood
| WalterBright wrote:
| I learned to read phonetically, sounding out the words. It
| worked very well. No other scheme for learning to read has
| worked remotely as well.
| bell-cot wrote:
| No Professor or "expert" in the Education field ever
| advanced their own career by advocating for simple &
| obvious things which actually worked.
|
| /s?
| taeric wrote:
| I think I was too swayed by Sold a Story; but I am
| heavily convinced that the non phonics based attempts to
| teach reading was a massive disaster. And not just for
| reading literature, but also for reading math. Without
| learning to effectively interact with symbols, people
| grow to think they either get the math or they don't.
| coffeeling wrote:
| Yeah, English orthography is a hot mess, but it's still
| fundamentally phonetic and alphabetic. Just try to learn to
| read Japanese or Chinese, and you'll very quickly come to
| miss English's pile of nonsense.
| coffeeling wrote:
| Agreed, a far better critique of English spelling:
|
| https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/cha.
| ..
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| > Even turning the 'o' into /I/ relies on fairly regular
| vowel destressing
|
| Isn't the "o" in "women" stressed?
| eesmith wrote:
| 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.
| 6P58r3MXJSLi wrote:
| 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.
| eesmith wrote:
| Yes, and how do those entirely true observations connect to
| the non-use of diacritics in English?
|
| I pointed out the ship example from the text, which was
| used to demonstrate how "this early French influence over
| English, which arose from the Norman Conquest, is the
| beginning of the reason why English is written without
| accent marks. ... This was the French habit that the
| Normans brought to England: the use of extra letters to
| spell sounds that the alphabet didn't have special letters
| for. This is why English has combinations like sh, th, ee,
| oo, ou that each make only a single sound."
|
| That's an extra letter being used to indicate a different
| sound than the base sound, similar to how diacritics are
| used to indicate a different sound than the base sound
| ("the cedilla has the function of ensuring that a c can be
| pronounced like an s, despite coming before an a, o, or,
| u").
| 6P58r3MXJSLi wrote:
| > "is the beginning of the reason why English is written
| without accent marks" > sh, th, ee, oo, ou
|
| That's cool 'n all, but I believe that only applies to
| French writing in English for English people.
|
| Many languages have combinations of letters that have a
| single sound, it's no excuse for not having accents.
|
| In German one can write strasse and strasse or muller and
| mueller (different writing, same sound). They too don't
| have accents, but words written differently also _sound_
| different: schon = "already" and schon = "beautiful".
|
| But German, on one hand retained diacritic marks, on the
| other it's also almost deterministic about pronunciation.
|
| _a_ it 's always /a/
|
| _a_ it 's always /e/ or /@/ like _e_
|
| _sch_ it 's always /S/ as in schule
|
| _ch_ it 's always /x/ after a, o, u and /c/ after e, i
|
| and so on
|
| English doesn't use diacritics, IMO, because English
| doesn't make sense, it's a pastiche of lowest common
| denominators, so fck diacritics, they are too hard, let's
| write words as we like and pronounce them the way we feel
| they should sound, regardless of how they are written.
|
| But it could use accents, for example record and record,
| present and present, permit and permit it's just they
| never thought it could be useful...
| eesmith wrote:
| > but I believe that only applies to French writing in
| English for English people
|
| Shrug. Yes, languages have different paths in their
| linguist and lexicographic evolution. Film at 11.
|
| I still like what this linguistics PhD wrote about the
| specific history of one aspect of English language
| evolution.
|
| > English doesn't make sense
|
| That is of course an exaggeration. Just because the rules
| are complex and full of exceptions doesn't mean there's
| no sense. Even if you reject all of linguistics, Shannon
| in "Prediction and entropy of printed English",
| demonstrated that English is compressible, which means
| there must be some patterns.
|
| Now to drink some mate.
| int_19h wrote:
| > Many languages have combinations of letters that have a
| single sound, it's no excuse for not having accents.
|
| You don't need an "excuse" for not having accents.
| Digraphs and diacritical marks are simply two different
| ways to mark a letter as being pronounced as "somewhat
| similar but different". Whether one is better than the
| other is a matter of subjective perception, and it's very
| common for languages to not do it consistently. For
| example, Spanish has "ll" but also "n" (ironically the
| latter used to be "nn"!), and Czech has "c" but also
| "ch".
|
| What's criminal about English is not the lack of
| diacritics, but rather the extremely convoluted and hard
| to predict rules for interpreting digraphs and trigraphs.
| If "ch" always meant the same thing, it would be just
| fine.
| KurSix wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Like others, I don't find that nonsense word particularly
| enlightening.
|
| But maybe compare '-ough' in: cough, tough, dough, through,
| plough.
| wizardforhire wrote:
| 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.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| 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.
| wizardforhire wrote:
| Specifically to english and dialects, you are correct.
| England proper has a different dialect and accent for every
| nook! London for literal neighborhoods! It also has several
| hundred if not thousand of years on the US for language to
| develop. Africa has everyone beat on this front. Bantu
| alone has who knows how many sublanguages! America has done
| a pretty remarkable thing in keeping its language
| internally consistent despite it's overwhelming cultural
| diversity and influences! That it sucks to learn for the
| uninitiated is exactly for this reason.
| tempodox wrote:
| 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).
| brainwad wrote:
| 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.
| OJFord wrote:
| It does sometimes, though its use may mark the author as among
| the aged.
|
| 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 _naively_ without.
|
| Diphthongs too, especially in British English, are not just an
| archaeological find, though out of pragmatism usually written
| digitally with two separate characters.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _though its use may mark the author as among the aged_
|
| Thirtysomething here. I use diaeresis (a/k/a diaeresis) over
| _e.g._ cooperate. It's more concise than a hyphen. And it makes
| more sense than cooperate, given cooper is a word.
| krige wrote:
| Thirtysomething here too. I see a diaeresis in naive often
| enough to remember that it happens yet uncommon enough to be
| taken by surprise anyway.
| GianFabien wrote:
| 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.
| OJFord wrote:
| _Did you mean misspelled_
| kzrdude wrote:
| > As a result of these circumstances, things like spelling
| practices varied from one place to another, and one scribe
| to another. The same word could even be written on the same
| page in multiple ways.
|
| I believe we can all still be confident scribes and maybe
| even have our own preferred way of writing words, where we
| within reason push the boundaries or push our own
| viewpoints through self expression :D
| GianFabien wrote:
| "mispelt" is a somewhat archaic British spelling.
| "mispelled" is more _modern_.
| danbolt wrote:
| 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.
| jamestown44 wrote:
| me too: 'dialog' is a computer popup; 'dialogue' is a
| verbal exchange
| KineticLensman wrote:
| For me (Brit), 'program' is some software and 'programme'
| is a collection of projects, in the project management
| sense
| paulmooreparks wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| KurSix wrote:
| So we can use them if you're feeling fancy or writing for The
| New Yorker
| eahm wrote:
| 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.
| mousethatroared wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| eahm wrote:
| 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.
| prisenco wrote:
| I have relatives in Bari so I've been fascinated by Barese.
| My Italian is not good but I can passively pick it up when
| listening or watching television, but Barese sounds 100%
| like a completely different language to me. French and
| Spanish are more intelligible.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gEKxf8RD-OM
| eahm wrote:
| Funny also I moved to USA ~20 years ago and you lose the
| Italian, you don't remember words etc. but you'll never
| lose your dialect, it just comes natural because that's
| how you grew up instead of what you learned growing up
| and from school, Tuscan people have it easier because the
| language comes from their dialect, Dante etc.
|
| And to add, I wouldn't click that link if you paid me
| lol, I hate the Barese... ok I clicked, funny stuff.
| ABS wrote:
| you are making the mistake of confusing your experience,
| which is of course legit but anecdata, with "how it
| works" in general.
|
| I'm an almost 50 years old Italian so not a spring
| chicken but I definitely learnt Italian growing up, not a
| dialect, and not "from school".
|
| I guess it's the difference between growing up in a city
| vs a village.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| Well yeah, GP's comment obviously only applies in the
| case that your native language is not standard Italian.
| ABS wrote:
| not obvious at all when every sentence uses "you" to
| indicate a general rule that applies to every Italian
| rather than "I" to indicate a personal experience
| stavros wrote:
| Hah, Barese sounds like a Frenchman is trying to speak
| Italian but can't be bothered.
| ithkuil wrote:
| I grew up in southern Switzerland and the dialect situation
| is the same as you describe.
|
| Not necessarily every town retained their distinctive
| dialect in practice because people move, not all parents
| pass the dialect down to their kids etc.
|
| But I remember a friend of mine lived in this village of 40
| inhabitants where they said "e peu que?" instead of italian
| "e poi cosa?"
| tacker2000 wrote:
| This article is about accents on letters (diacritics), not
| accents as in dialects.
|
| I found your post interesting neverthelesss.
| Luker88 wrote:
| 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"
| lompad wrote:
| Germany is similar. Especially in more rural areas, a
| couple villages away people are going to have a hard time
| understanding you.
|
| Though there's typically a common dialect variant everybody
| speaks, usually the one spoken by the largest city in the
| region.
|
| E.g. every middle-franconian understands Nuremberg
| franconian dialect and is able to talk in a way they would
| understand.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I'm American
|
| My ear has just gotten to the point of noticing German
| dialects, and spotting the quizzical looks of other
| German/Austrian/Swiss people in the group
|
| Fascinating. I feel like they had 1,000 years to resolve
| this
| adonovan wrote:
| 1000? Prussia dissolved only in 1947 and the nation state
| of Germany was reunified only in 1990.
|
| In any case, communication technology (trains, TVs) is a
| greater determinant of dialect than government.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| suboptimal outcome for sure
| fakedang wrote:
| Heck, Swiss German is like this lol.
|
| My cofounder's wife, during a parents together at school,
| was "advised" by some of the mothers to not "hang around
| those" mothers because they're stranger folk. Turns out,
| they lived 1.5 miles away in the next village.
| jason-johnson wrote:
| well, if you ignore the current country borders then
| "German" would encompass a large portion of Switzerland
| and the Netherlands. So, with that assumption, I would be
| surprised if Italian had more dialects than German.
| stavros wrote:
| Italian script doesn't use diacritics, though, so it's not
| the same kind of accent as the article talks about.
| Luker88 wrote:
| Italian script most definitely requires diacritics.
|
| "e" (is) vs "e" (and)
|
| "pero" (pear tree) vs "pero" (but)
|
| "perche" is the only correct one and "perche" and
| "perche" do not exist
|
| and so many other examples.
| stavros wrote:
| Oh huh, I've forgotten more Italian than I thought,
| thanks for the correction!
| eesmith wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mddw wrote:
| I am afraid this quote is an urban legend. It never
| existed.
| int_19h wrote:
| Stamping out minority languages and dialects was (and often
| still is) unfortunately common in most countries. I'm
| Russian, and my native regional dialect has some minor
| differences from standard Russian that make it sound a bit
| more like Belarusian. I remember how in school we had a
| teacher making fun of our manner of pronouncing words as
| "kolkhoznik speech" (implying that only the uneducated
| speak like that). This was in 1990s.
| rkomorn wrote:
| > 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.
| eesmith wrote:
| FWIW, the book was written in 1972.
|
| I mean "there were some people", not all people - Thomas,
| in the quote, came from Paris and spoke French. He did not
| learn a regional language.
|
| I don't mean 'many regions' because the only example I had
| was one region. The fact that there was at least one region
| where local French people, in a region which had been part
| of France seemingly since at least the Middle Ages, did not
| speak French as their mother tongue, astonished me.
|
| FWIW, the French Wikipedia page says:
|
| > Ainsi Malevil serait partiellement inspire du site de
| Commarques (sa grotte, son abri troglodyte et son
| chateau)[2], tandis que le village de la Roque serait
| partiellement inspire de la Roque Saint-Christophe,
| forteresse troglodyte voisine du chateau de Commarque. ...
|
| and the location,
|
| > La vallee des Rhunes : inspiree de la vallee des Beunes,
| et plus precisement la grande Beune.
|
| so the author's fictional location was supposed to suggest
| the department of Dordogne in south west France.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limousin_dialect tells me
|
| > Limousin ... is a dialect of the Occitan language, spoken
| in the three departments of Limousin, parts of Charente and
| the Dordogne in the southwest of France. ... Limousin is
| used primarily by people over age 50 in rural communities.
| All speakers speak French as a first or second language.
| Due to the French single language policy, it is not
| recognised by the government and therefore considered
| endangered by the linguistic community.
|
| Those people over age of 50 would likely have been children
| in a book written 53 years ago, with Limousin as a much
| more common language amongst the local adults.
| rkomorn wrote:
| "Over 50 in rural communities" in one of the more
| sparsely populated areas of France makes for a very small
| slice of the population even in that area, and even then,
| as pointed out, French is spoken by everyone.
|
| On top of that, it is more "anyone who speaks limousin is
| likely over 50, and in a rural community", than "anyone
| over 50 in rural communities in that area likely speaks
| Limousin".
|
| There are 10k speakers of Limousin today (according to
| Wikipedia), out of about 1.2M residents in Dordogne and
| Limousin combined. That's less than 1% just for that
| area.
|
| To me, it is more of a local curiosity than a mind-
| blowing fact, but I suppose I grew up learning about the
| various dialects in France, so I have a different take.
| eesmith wrote:
| > and even then, as pointed out, French is spoken by
| everyone.
|
| Yes, as even the Malevil quote I gave pointed out. (At
| least by school age.)
|
| > On top of that, it is more
|
| The book was written over 50 years ago, so the Wikipedia
| article about present day use of Limousin isn't all that
| indicative of what it was like for the adult characters
| in the book, who would have been born before 1950.
|
| > There are 10k speakers of Limousin
|
| Why are you being so nit-picky? Look, this is a fictional
| place and the specific local language is never stated. I
| just today read the Wikipedia entry which give info about
| the location.
|
| I specifically picked out Limousin, yes, because it fit
| the area, and because I could quote how the Limousin
| language was more widely spoken when the book was written
| than now.
|
| But as the text I quoted says "Limousin ... is a dialect
| of the Occitan language". Wikipedia says there are about
| 200,000 speakers of Occitan, so that's the more relevant
| comparison, and "Though it was still an everyday language
| for most of the rural population of southern France well
| into the 20th century, the language is now declining in
| every region where it was spoken." -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occitan_language
|
| It seems to me that when Malevil was written, Occitan was
| still widely spoken as a first language in the area.
| Wikipedia says the author was living in the area when he
| wrote the book, so he should know.
|
| The only reason I mentioned it was because you wrote
| "Finding anyone who even spoke a regional dialect
| would've been a novelty, let alone one who grew up
| speaking it before French." while the book, written by
| the French novelist Robert Merle - Wikipedia informs me
| he was "a household name in France, with the author
| repeatedly called the Alexandre Dumas of the 20th
| century" - comes across that speaking in patois was not a
| novelty but simply something expected, and which
| effectively all locals spoke.
|
| I simply cannot reconcile your surprise with my reading
| and limited understanding except by assuming it's from
| before your time, from a mostly forgotten era.
|
| > I suppose I grew up learning about the various dialects
| in France
|
| That's .. kinda the issue, isn't? In Malevil the local
| language patois is not seen as a dialect of French, as I
| quoted, it was a language learned in school.
|
| Wikipedia says it's more related to Catalan than French.
|
| Why do you describe it as dialect of French?
| rkomorn wrote:
| > Why do you describe it as dialect of French?
|
| Did I? I mentioned dialects in France, not of French,
| IIRC.
|
| I'm nitpicking because, TBH, I quite likely just read too
| much into your use of "astounded" in your original
| comment. It seemed to me that you were overestimating how
| prevalent or significant these languages were.
|
| By the mid-20th century, they were already quite less
| popular and even less so by the time Malevil took place
| (1977, I take it, even though it was written a few years
| earlier), especially when it came to being taught before
| French.
|
| At the same time, I guess I was maybe as surprised to
| learn that Louisiana French is still a thing as you were
| about these areas in France. :)
| eesmith wrote:
| When is something a dialect in France and when is it a
| language in France?
|
| > It seemed to me that you were overestimating how
| prevalent or significant these languages were.
|
| I said I was in _sixth grade_ , a kid living in the US.
|
| I didn't even know then there was more than one Romance
| language in Italy - as I alluded to in my original
| comment.
|
| Yes, I now, decades later, know more. But I was sharing
| my childhood misapprehension and how I learned the world
| was more complicated than 11 year old me thought as
| something meant for others to smile at and enjoy, not to
| be nitpicked as if my comment was any profound statement
| about all of France.
|
| My interpretation was not "questionable" - the story
| clearly was supposed to take place in a part of France
| where many of those in the countryside still learned a
| Romance language other than French as their mother
| tongue. That matches the real history for that supposed
| area that the author drew from. Yes, it's certainly
| something that's a lot less common now, some 50 years
| later. But then just say that things have changed.
| rkomorn wrote:
| My bad for nitpicking. Sorry.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| See also: Jamaican Patois aka speakyspoke
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaican_Patois
| yawboakye wrote:
| 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
| IAmBroom wrote:
| I studied Anglo-Norman French (circa 1300s), and found it
| strikingly useful speaking with a woman who worked in the
| Breton region of France.
| qsort wrote:
| 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.
| Luker88 wrote:
| 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.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That's not really true. There's no scientific reason to say
| that some varieties are "dialects" and some are
| "languages". It is purely a political and culture question.
| lou1306 wrote:
| > 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.
| __s wrote:
| Dante is a poor example for language proficiency, as he was
| educated / traveled/ well read. The common person would
| have a much different lived experience
|
| I have colleagues in India. It's a diverse mesh of regions
| that vary in about every way. Was explained people grow up
| with 3 languages, their regional language, a neighboring
| region's language, a more general language, & then educated
| folk are taught English. Then in school they were still
| taking classes for other romantic languages. At an Indian
| restaurant with one colleague I noticed they would mostly
| rely on hand gestures. One factor here is that there may
| often be a language barrier
|
| I've also interacted a bit with Senegalese, which has Wolof
| as the primary language, then French taught in schools.
| Many only know Wolof (with French influence weaved in). &
| the well educated learn to speak English, & how to maintain
| more European French accent
| paul_h wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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
| jjav wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| IAmBroom wrote:
| 'Ennery 'Iggins, is that you?
| morganf wrote:
| 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.
| umanwizard wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| eahm wrote:
| Yeah, from near Urbino but moved to USA ~20 years ago.
| theletterf wrote:
| Urbino is more like Central Italy.
| pmichaud wrote:
| 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?
| umanwizard wrote:
| 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.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| 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_19h wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Fascinating site...
| KurSix wrote:
| 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
| demetrius wrote:
| > 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 cwen instead of cwen, but these are modern invention).
|
| So, English didn't use diacritics before Normans, and Normans
| didn't change this.
| gwd wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rob74 wrote:
| Well, the "lead issue" could be fixed by writing the verb
| "leed" (after all, it's exactly the same sound as in the
| word "queen" mentioned in the article), but for some reason
| this hasn't happened...
| brainwad wrote:
| It happened in newspaper jargon for the leading sentence
| of an article (though they used the spelling "lede"
| instead), because "lead" was already a metonym for hot
| type (which was cast out of the metal).
|
| It hasn't happened otherwise presumably because the risk
| of confusion is normally very low when not in a Pb-filled
| context.
| t-3 wrote:
| 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.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| We are polite and it is considered racist.
| dvh wrote:
| Ai bliv inglis sud imbreis diakritiks, ounli daunsaid ai si is it
| wud spel di end of speling bi kompetisns. Pun intendid.
| cenamus wrote:
| Czech diacritics taking over the world :-)
| int_19h wrote:
| 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...
| brainwad wrote:
| 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 a: vowels are ae in American and which are a? How are the
| Americans supposed to know which a's are a: vs a in Australia?
| etc. etc.
| mgaunard wrote:
| French barely has diacritics.
| kergonath wrote:
| There aren't that many different diacritics, but every other
| word has one. Just look at any text in French, it's full of e,
| e, e, and a.
| Tepix wrote:
| You mean Umlauts?
| richrichardsson wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Correct. It's "one sound" represented by two letters, but not
| always the same sound in different words.
| richrichardsson wrote:
| Ah, I misunderstood "one sound" as meaning, "these letters
| only ever produce one sound that is unchanging regardless the
| word".
| petesergeant wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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"
| jgalt212 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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. g -> 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_19h wrote:
| 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 U, 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 "c" are the same
| thing, and you use the latter when possible falling back to
| the former when you need ASCII.
| nelox wrote:
| The claim that "English doesn't use accents" is, quite frankly, a
| bit naive. After all, one only needs to step into a cafe for a
| creme brulee, or to read a novel featuring a tete-a-tete, to see
| that English is perfectly comfortable with accented words. From
| the resume of a job seeker to the facade of a building, from the
| attache case of a businessman to the naive assumptions of a
| newcomer, accents are sprinkled throughout our language like so
| many eclairs in a patisserie. English may not have been born with
| diacritics, but it has certainly acquired a taste for them.
| pif wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If I recall correctly, the accent marks only started to get
| dropped when people began using keyboards. Resume and fiancee
| still got an accent when it was handwritten
| LurkandComment wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| English is your favorite language to read and write? Said no
| one ever...
| tetraca wrote:
| 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).
| rrgok wrote:
| Oh thank god, someone said it. Who cares if "tree" is
| masculine or feminine, it does not give my any information.
| In Italian, tree is a masculine word: what can I do knowing
| "tree" is masculine?
| trealira wrote:
| Grammatical gender can serve as disambiguation. I just
| heard this sentence recently while watching something in
| Spanish:
|
| "No me compares con alguien como tu, que llegaste aqui de
| una isla oriental solo porque te impresiono un
| espectaculo de magia barato."
|
| In the phrase "un espectaculo de magia barato," which
| means "cheap magic show" here, you can tell from the
| genders of the nouns and adjectives that it's that
| "barato" modifies "espectaculo," meaning that the show is
| cheap and it's not that the magic is cheap.
|
| It's not that useful here, because it's not hard to
| figure out the correct meaning from the context anyway,
| but it's a tool that helps clarity regardless. And when
| you learn a language well enough, it's not like you're
| thinking about this super consciously, you just know the
| word and gendering it and its adjectives flows right off
| your tongue. I think this is probably easier for a non-
| native to learn than all the irregular spellings of
| English, but I wouldn't know, being a native English
| speaker.
| zahlman wrote:
| Just because something is complete nonsense, doesn't mean it
| can't be enjoyable.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| I think English makes a lot of sense, but only if you
| invest the time to learn some of its etymology. Knowing
| some Latin, German, and Greek roots (in that order) is
| immensely helpful. You don't have to learn those languages
| per se, just some of the vocab. Eventually, you can look at
| a word, know if it's Latin/French, Germanic, or Greek in
| origin and all the spelling rules make much more sense.
|
| This takes a lot of time, effort, and interest however,
| which is why many (most?) people think English is
| nonsensical.
| louthy wrote:
| It is my favourite language to read and write.
|
| I am English though.
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| 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.
| williamdclt wrote:
| > 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"
| JambalayaJimbo wrote:
| How would you account for the fact that for many words,
| there isn't a consistent pronunciation rule for it at all?
| For example, I would guess that 50% of English speakers are
| non-rhotic.
| bcatanzaro wrote:
| English pronunciation does vary quite widely and it would
| be difficult to rewrite all the books and websites into
| all the different accents.
|
| It's also decentralized - there's no authority to tell
| the English-speaking community how to spell things or how
| to say things.
|
| I think these are both advantages that outweigh the
| phonetic inconsistency.
| williamdclt wrote:
| To be clear, I'm not particularly advocating for making
| english a phonetic language. I'm just saying it being
| non-phonetic does cause issues (and makes it frustrating,
| but also shows a very interesting history).
|
| Assuming we wanted to make English a phonetic language,
| then your question is kind of moot: phonetic means we
| need to pick the pronunciation rules for phonemes, which
| would make other ways to pronounce these phonemes
| incorrect. Some of currently-correct english would become
| incorrect english.
|
| > For example, I would guess that 50% of English speakers
| are non-rhotic
|
| Note that accent isn't really what people talk about when
| they complain about pronunciation. The problem is that
| there's no mapping from letters to phoneme in any english
| accent: laughter/slaughter, draught/draught,
| G(a)vin/D(a)vid...
| int_19h wrote:
| Same way other dialect continuums account for it: you
| standardize spelling on some variant, or several variants
| if that is non-viable (which, yes, does mean that e.g.
| American and British English spellings would diverge
| somewhat).
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| at some point these differences would qualify as
| different languages...
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| > Most of us still mispronounce some words
|
| The bureaucratization of language is more problematic in my
| view, where things are seen as wrong and right and we try
| to cram the beauty of of natural language into a restricted
| box that can be cleanly and easily defined and worked with
| universally. I quite literally have nothing but detest for
| this conception of language, that it must bend to the whims
| of rigidity when it's very clearly a natural, highly
| chaotic dynamic system constantly undergoing evolution in
| unexpected ways.
| codeflo wrote:
| > 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.
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| Edited for accuracy, thanks.
| aimanbenbaha wrote:
| 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_19h wrote:
| 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,NG
|
| Plosives: p,b,t,d,k,g
|
| Affricates: tS, dZ
|
| Fricatives: f,v,th,d,s,z,S,Z,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 tS/tS or between dZ/dZ; then we can
| repurpose Jj for Z. For NG 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
| th,d,S, and perhaps Z. All of these except for th actually
| exist as extended Latin characters in their own right, with
| proper upper/lowercase pairs, so we could just use them as
| such: Dd SHS ZHZ. And for th there's the historical English
| thorn: Thth. The same goes for ngNG 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 Ss =S and
| Zz=Z, and we could use e.g. crossbar for the other two: Dd
| and Tt. If we're doing that, we might also take Cc for c. And
| if we really want a distinct letter for NG, we could use Nn.
|
| 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=S x=d q=th we don't need
| any diacritics at all!
|
| Moving on to vowels, in GA we have:
|
| Monopthongs: ^,ae,a,e,@,i,I,o,u,U
|
| Diphthongs: aI,eI,oI,aU,oU
|
| R-colored: aR,@,oR.
|
| Diphthongs can be reasonably represented using the
| combination of vowel + y/w for the glide, thus:
| ay,ey,oy,aw,ow.
|
| For monophthongs, firstly, ^ can be treated as stressed
| allophone of @. If we do so, then all vowels (save for o
| which stands by itself) form natural pairs which can be
| expressed as diacritics: Aa=a, Aa=ae, Ee=e, Ee=@, Ii=i, Ii=I,
| Oo=o, Uu=u, Uu=U.
|
| 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: a,e,i,u - 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 NG getting its own letter - we need 10:
| a,c,d,e,i,n,s,t,z,u.
|
| I don't think that's particularly excessive, not even the
| latter variant.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Now try to get close to a billion people around the world
| with already varied cultures to follow the "new" rules of
| their native language.
| int_19h wrote:
| I'm well aware that any kind of English spelling reform
| is non-viable for backwards compatibility reasons.
|
| But that is a different argument from saying that English
| can't use diacritic-based orthography because the
| phonemic inventory is too complex.
| mamonoleechi wrote:
| 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.
| williamdclt wrote:
| > 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
| dragonmost wrote:
| I feel not being understood when pronunciation is off is
| more of a France french issue. You will be understood
| eitherway in Canada (given you speak with french
| Canadians). But I sometime have difficulty being understood
| by frenchmans, less so with other french speaking cultures
| gnubison wrote:
| It would be like a speaker who can't distinguish the uh
| sound in "but" with the ih sound in "bit". Is it really
| the native English speaker's fault if he can't understand
| that personal dialect?
|
| France's vowel inventory is bigger than (or just as big
| as) English's, and it has a lot more homophones. I
| imagine all the context goes toward disambiguating the
| actual homophones and not the arbitrary sets of words
| foreigners can't pronounce because they don't want to
| learn the accents (the system is not that hard and
| completely predictable).
| koverstreet wrote:
| Spanish is a bit tidier with them then French, though
| lucasoshiro wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| How can writing marks help in this regard? I can imagine a
| language with both a lot of exceptions and writing marks.
| stouset wrote:
| Accent marks give additional phonetic information.
| stevedzreams wrote:
| because you know the stress syllable by looking at the
| word. take Desert and Dessert, do we say DES-ert or des-
| ERT. Also in portuguese, at least, I can know which "e"
| sound [1] each "e" in the word makes by knowing this (well,
| almost, but not completely, but much better than English.)
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio
| lucasoshiro wrote:
| In Portuguese, they indicate that a syllable is stressed
| and alternate ways to say the vowels. e.g. "pais" is
| stressed in "i" and means "country", while "pais" is
| stressed in "a" and means "parents". Tilde (~) indicates
| that the vowel is nasal, e.g. the "a" in "Sao Paulo" means
| that it sounds like the "u" in "sun"; the default sound of
| "a" in Portuguese is the same as in "car".
| darrenf wrote:
| Maybe Jazz Emu is onto something:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ69ny57pR0
| Izkata wrote:
| 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.
| 98codes wrote:
| I couldn't help to look and see if the company behind
| commercials that are burned into my brain from 40 years ago
| are still a thing, and lo, Hooked on Phonics is still going
| strong!
|
| This page[1] walks through the basics of phonemic awareness
| that children need to learn via exposure & repetition in
| order to learn to apply that aural learning to reading.
|
| It makes me wonder if a program like this, aimed at
| English-speaking children, might help those adults learning
| to speak & read English if they could put up with being
| addressed as if they were a child.
|
| [1] https://www.hookedonphonics.com/reading/phonemic-
| awareness/
| int_19h wrote:
| The complexity of these rules, and the number of exceptions
| that you need to learn notwithstanding the rules, can be
| roughly estimated for any given language by training a
| language model on word <-> IPA correspondence for that
| language (using a subset of the vocabulary as a training
| set), and then seeing how well it can predict the remaining
| words. You can run it in either direction, too, to
| separately measure the difficulty of reading (word -> IPA)
| and writing (IPA -> word) that language.
|
| This was actually done for a number of languages including
| English:
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.13321
|
| You can see how languages with true phonemic spellings tend
| to be in the >90% range on both reading and writing, with
| Esperanto at 99%. Spanish and German are in 60-80% range.
| English is dismal at ~30% for both, though, with only
| French and Chinese being harder to write, and all other
| languages tested being easier to read.
| zahlman wrote:
| > 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 /I/ sound for "bitch" in
| unstressed syllables. But then, my local accent contrasts /I/
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dawnofdusk wrote:
| >but the spelling rules differ depending on whether the
| word was imported directly from Latin, or came in via
| Norman French
|
| In fact it can be even more complicated because in English
| the words can come from Norman dialects and "typical"
| French simultaneously. For example, warden and guardian
| come from the same word in Old French, the former is closer
| to how Normans pronounce it and the latter is closer to its
| modern French pronunciation.
| trealira wrote:
| > 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.
| foobiekr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Punctuation was indeed a later addition to Latin, as well as
| lowercase letters.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sotix wrote:
| 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.
| hbn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Possibly... English has a lot of linguistics with a lot of
| varied roots. You have many words taken from Old Norse and
| other Scandinavian influence as well as Latin, French and
| via proxy Greek derived words. Great Britain was highly
| fought over, contested, changed hands and merged cultures
| over the millennia.
|
| It is far more organic and mixed from different sources
| than many prescribed languages or very local dialects of
| other languages. It would be very hard to pin that down.
| Not to mention the history of printing presses themselves,
| such as how the Thorn character was itself replaced as well
| as deprecating a few other characters that were in common
| use in earlier Old English.
| jsbg wrote:
| As an ESL person I do wish English used accents the way Spanish
| does to indicate what syllable has the primary emphasis.
| serial_dev wrote:
| 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.
| meindnoch wrote:
| So that it fits into 7-b it ASCII.
| Lendal wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 e, a, c 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 wrote:
| 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.
| athenot wrote:
| 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 :)
| ViscountPenguin wrote:
| Do you have a source for the executive order claim? I can't
| find it on this list of executive orders signed by Lydon
| Johnson, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_executive_
| actions_by... . And as far as I can tell the claim
| originates on ascii-code.com and spread from there?
|
| Googling executive order 11110 gives no primary
| information.
|
| Edit: found it
| https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/memorandum-
| approvi...
|
| It's just not an executive order as far as I can tell. Not
| an expert on US governance by any means though.
|
| Edit 2: I mixed up Executive orders and Actions it seems?
| pests wrote:
| From a quick search it seems this was a Presidential
| Memorandum not an Executive Action.
|
| "Executive orders are generally more formal, require
| publication in the Federal Register, and must cite the
| President's legal authority, while memoranda are less
| formal, may not be published, and do not always require a
| justification of authority."
|
| These sometimes get called executive orders, like some
| memos that trump has signed in the last few months were
| called executive orders by the news and online.
|
| They are essentially the same though. Memos carry legal
| weight and can direct agencies to carry out specific
| actions.
| crabbone wrote:
| 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
| Io) 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 G' 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.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| You don't even have to leave English to find examples of
| printing shifting script. The printing press killed the
| thorn "Th" character which made the the "th" sound. It got
| replaced with either a "y" (which looked sorta-kinda like a
| thorn) as in "Ye Olde" or a "th", which is how a speaker
| not accustomed to the sound might approximate it "tuh-huh".
| SllX wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Tangential: Uu 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: ou. 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 wrote:
| 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".
| hbn wrote:
| 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.
| Xunjin wrote:
| 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.
| cvoss wrote:
| 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.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| 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.
| dawnofdusk wrote:
| In French you can (and most people do) drop diacritics from
| all uppercase forms.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| They are not diacritics since they don't alter the sound of the
| letter.
| cvoss wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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, aeiouyj, aeiouyj, aeiouyj (oops, my example shows an
| accent above the J's tittle-down one, but three up)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tittle
| owenversteeg wrote:
| 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 soupcon and expose are rarely
| written naked. If you want non-French, pick up the New Yorker and
| you will find cooperative and reelect, or a poem to find changed
| and learned. We use them in names, from Bronte to Beyonce.
|
| There is an excellent Wikipedia article that goes into detail on
| the subject:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical...
| acc_297 wrote:
| -Naive- 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 wrote:
| 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 "naive," but it will be familiar to
| readers of the New Yorker on words like "cooperate."
|
| 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 "nav", the congregational of a traditional church)
| were homophones. But the diaeresis shows you that the "a" and "i"
| are said independently (nah-ev).
|
| Of course, English also uses diacritics occasionally in some
| borrowed words: resume, nee, fiancee/fiance. But these are also
| considered optional.
| gavinward wrote:
| > 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.
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