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.
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
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, or German's 25. 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.
> 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”
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
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.
That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules [1], and trying to make 'fish' come out of ghoti requires breaking them. 'gh' only occurs as an /f/ sound when it occurs at the end of a syllable; as an initial consonant cluster, it's invariably /g/. Turning 'ti' to /ʃ/ is a fairly normal affricatization, which requires a subsequent vowel, which is lacking here (consider words like 'ratio', 'gracious', or 'nation'). Even turning the 'o' into /ɪ/ relies on fairly regular vowel destressing, which there's no reason to expect in 'ghoti'--which should be pronounced per English rules, pretty unambiguously, like goatee.
There are some real issues with English spelling, like the inconsistency of pronouncing 'ea' as /i/ or /ɛ/ (consider, uh, read and read). But 'ghoti' isn't one of them, because that's a case where there's not a lot of ambiguity in English pronunciation.
[1] The worst offenders in English pronunciation are when English borrows foreign words both with foreign pronunciations and foreign spellings.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, which is pretty recent. It used to be really expensive to distribute such a large volume of audio. The old "books on tape" used to cost a lot of money, were frequently abridged, and only existed for the most popular titles.
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.
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... ?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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, alleé, etc. Since the spoken context for all the conjugations is almost always clear, I'm not sure why someone introduced the extra complexity.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
> 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 dictées (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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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"?
(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.
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.
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 Córdoba, 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.
x is pronounced four different ways in Spanish: like j in México, 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.
Well, yes. I was speaking about standard Spanish from Spain.
Xenofobia is an s, yes, and excursión is "ks"
In fsct, Méjico 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 "Méjico" myself.
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 México is accepted now.
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.
I get your point, but FWIW, México is not a Mexican deviation; it's just an older Spanish spelling. E.g. Jiménez was once spelled Ximénez and there are probably lots of other examples.
The "root language spoken in its original place" absolutely did pronounce X like modern J.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s fairly good at helping us understand the etymology. Have a “y” acting as a vowel in the spelling? Good chance it’s Greek. Have a “k”? Almost certainly not Latin.
That is trivia that is useless in almost all contexts. I've been a native English speaker all my life and this is the first I've heard of that. I can't think of any situation in life where knowing that fact would have been helpful. Your claim seems reasonable, but if someone says you are wrong I wouldn't fact check it even if clear links were posted so that I could.
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)
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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]).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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”
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.
> Turning 'ti' to /ʃ/ is a fairly normal affricatization
It can't be an affrication, because /ʃ/ is not an affricate. (Although /tj/ is affricated, as /tʃ/ [think "gotcha"] - when you say 'ti', you're referring to words that were pronounced with /s/ rather than /t/.)
Wouldn't /sj/ -> /ʃ/ usually just be called "palatalization"?
(The specific phenomenon in the context of English appears to be called "yod-coalescence".)
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.
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"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.
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"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").
"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 /ŋ/ 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 /dʒ/ (like "j" for those who can't read IPA) aren't subject to this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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 /ˈsɪŋɚ/ and /ˈfɪŋɡəɹ/ end up?)
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 /ɪ/ is unrelated.
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!
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.
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.
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").
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
> to dramatize what would otherwise be a dry spelling shift
I don't think that's how it was developed, though. I really doubt there are real-world cases where cwen was scrubbed and queen written above it (correct me if I'm wrong!).
I think it’s more like “people stopped writing English for time being, only learned to write Norman and Latin, so when they needed to write a word or two, they’s use the spelling they knew. Eventually, this spelling because the way of writing English”.
I don’t think a situation with Godwin is plausible.
> I never realized the irony that English avoids
> diacritics because of French influence
I'm not sure that's the best way to put it. Old English also generally didn’t use diacritics (modern texts add them: we’d use cwēn instead of cƿen, but these are modern invention).
So, English didn't use diacritics before Normans, and Normans didn't change this.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
> 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. ;)
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.
> 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.
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 inspiré du site de Commarques (sa grotte, son abri troglodyte et son château)[2], tandis que le village de la Roque serait partiellement inspiré de la Roque Saint-Christophe, forteresse troglodyte voisine du château de Commarque. ...
and the location,
> La vallée des Rhunes : inspirée de la vallée des Beunes, et plus précisément la grande Beune.
so the author's fictional location was supposed to suggest the department of Dordogne in south west France.
> 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.
"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.
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].
> 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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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
> 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.
The Economist magazine uses a diæresis (two dots) in words like “coöperate” and “reëlect” to indicate that both vowels are pronounced separately, rather than as a diphthong. This is considered old-school and uncommon though.
That is the fun thing about English. There isn't really a single right way to speak or write it. It is defined by common usage. As long as your audience understands you, it is correct.
As someone else pointed out, loan words often have accents. At what point does jalapeño become en english word? There is no other english word to refer to the pepper, therefore it is now an english word and therefore english words can have diacritics.
The closest thing we have to a source of truth for the english language is the OED. It isn't prescriptive, it just lists how words are used rather than how words should be used.
> That is the fun thing about English. There isn't really a single right way to speak or write it. It is defined by common usage. As long as your audience understands you, it is correct.
That's how all languages work - to the chagrin of l'Académie Française - English is no special exception.
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.
Learning the relationship between a diæresis and a diphthong and then seeing that the word diæresis contains a diphthong has rounded out my day nicely, thanks for that.
I enjoyed learning recently that the most common diacritics in Czech are the háček and the čárka. The word "háček" has a čárka followed by a háček, while the word "čárka" has a háček followed by by a čárka!
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.
Similarly, a grave accent is sometimes used in poetry to indicate that a single vowel is voiced - e.g. in "cursèd" to indicate that the word should be pronounced as two syllables "curse-ed", rather than a single syllable "curst".
Loanwords often retain their accents as well: cliché, façade, doppelgänger, jalapeño.
I’ve always seen it written with an acute accent: ‘curséd.’ Wikipedia notes both usages, but to my knowledge I have never once read a poem which used a grave accent that way.
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.
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!).
That seems like a quirk of the magazine for thsie pstticular words, but its more common for some others like "naïve" and "Zoë", although that's gone out of fashion somewhat since computers took over (and I believe both of those are loan words in english)
Oh interesting, I've never seen those cases. I'd say it's more common (although maybe still a little old-school?) to use it in words like Noël or Chloë.
You don't even use them consistently in the same sentence (your unaccented i has at least 3 different values, for instance).
The real reason English spelling is frozen in the 1600s is that that is the last time all English speakers had a common language community. Since the foundation of the colonies, Englishes have diverged from each other from that starting point, so that no reform can be neutral to all current Englishes - some have merged what was distinct in early modern English (e.g. cot-caught merger); while in other cases what was a single class has been split (e.g. the bath-trap split). Wikipedia has a (non-comprehensive) table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_correspondences_between_... note for example that even where two varieties have merged phonemes, they might have merged them differently (compare Southern American to Australian). You might try to come up with a spelling system that covers all possible combinations, but it would be then very hard for the speakers who have mergers (i.e. all of them) to use - how is an Australian supposed to know which äː vowels are æ in American and which are ɑ? How are the Americans supposed to know which ɑ's are äː vs ɒ in Australia? etc. etc.
It does sometimes, though its use may mark the author as among the agèd.
Not to mention loanwords, which of course English is full of, and are sometimes considered properly spelt with their original accents, though many will spell them naïvely without.
Diphthongs too, especially in British English, are not just an archæological find, though out of pragmatism usually written digitally with two separate characters.
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.
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.
> 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
> though its use may mark the author as among the agèd
Thirtysomething here. I use diaeresis (a/k/a diæresis) over e.g. coöperate. It’s more concise than a hyphen. And it makes more sense than cooperate, given cooper is a word.
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.
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”
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.
Do you have any examples? As a Finnish speaker the Swedish "a" sounds the same. "Pappa", "framtiden" etc.
It's "ä" and "e" which have swapped uses, but it's not exactly consistent (e.g. "Järnvägstorget" where first ä is close to the Finnish ä, second ä is closer to e but so is the e at the end)
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
> 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).
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
Another way of saying this is that spoken English has a lot of inbuilt, inherent error correct-ability, ala a very large minimum Hamming distance between spoken words/phrases.
I always found French to be very much the opposite in spoken form, due to the 'consonnes finales muettes' and liaison and élision, along with the large amount of homonyms and general colloquialism used in everyday speech. Yet in written form, it is nearly as straightforward as English, as you get back those damn letters that aren't being spoken.
> I always found French to be very much the opposite in spoken form, due to the 'consonnes finales muettes' and liaison and élision, along with the large amount of homonyms and general colloquialism used in everyday speech.
It is not that different from English in that respect. I found both to be quite difficult compared to e.g. German, which is very regular, or Spanish (which is annoying grammar-wise but straightforward to pronounce).
Spoken English is full of elisions and silent letters, and also full of locale-dependent colloquialisms that take some time getting used to. I remember struggling for a while living in New York and London despite having a decent level in “standard” English. I still occasionally struggle with my mates from Ireland and Yorkshire. After living more than a decade in English-speaking countries I accepted that I will never be able to pronounce correctly a word I never heard before.
Missing liaisons is not problematic when you speak French. It marks you as a non-native but it does not make you harder to understand. They can be often omitted by natives as well, depending on the accent.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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, miúdo 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.
If people want a language with "proper rules"... head over to conlangs. https://youtu.be/x_x_PQ85_0khttps://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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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):
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.
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.
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
)
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.
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.
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
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):
> 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".
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.
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)
As Esperanto was designed to be a neutral language that took words from many (European) languages, it needed an orthography that would unambiguously denote those sounds.
You can trivially transliterate the circumflex letter with digraphs using h anyway. ĝ -> gh
Still perfectly readable.
If you want a language where there is a trivial and unambiguous mapping between written and spoken language and the sounds don't exist in basic latin script, you need to do something. You can use diacritics, you can use digraphs and other tricks or well you just give up. But saying they are "unnecessary complexity" is very mistaken.
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.
The claim that “English doesn’t use accents” is, quite frankly, a bit naïve. After all, one only needs to step into a café for a crème brûlée, or to read a novel featuring a tête-à-tête, to see that English is perfectly comfortable with accented words. From the résumé of a job seeker to the façade of a building, from the attaché case of a businessman to the naïve assumptions of a newcomer, accents are sprinkled throughout our language like so many éclairs in a patisserie. English may not have been born with diacritics, but it has certainly acquired a taste for them.
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.
If I recall correctly, the accent marks only started to get dropped when people began using keyboards. Resumé and fiancée still got an accent when it was handwritten
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.
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.
> 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
How can writing marks help in this regard? I can imagine a language with both a lot of exceptions and writing marks.
Accent marks give additional phonetic information.
Spanish is a bit tidier with them then French, though
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, or German's 25. 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.
> 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”
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.
> 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.
English is your favorite language to read and write? Said no one ever…
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.
> 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
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.
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
That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules [1], and trying to make 'fish' come out of ghoti requires breaking them. 'gh' only occurs as an /f/ sound when it occurs at the end of a syllable; as an initial consonant cluster, it's invariably /g/. Turning 'ti' to /ʃ/ is a fairly normal affricatization, which requires a subsequent vowel, which is lacking here (consider words like 'ratio', 'gracious', or 'nation'). Even turning the 'o' into /ɪ/ relies on fairly regular vowel destressing, which there's no reason to expect in 'ghoti'--which should be pronounced per English rules, pretty unambiguously, like goatee.
There are some real issues with English spelling, like the inconsistency of pronouncing 'ea' as /i/ or /ɛ/ (consider, uh, read and read). But 'ghoti' isn't one of them, because that's a case where there's not a lot of ambiguity in English pronunciation.
[1] The worst offenders in English pronunciation are when English borrows foreign words both with foreign pronunciations and foreign spellings.
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.
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.
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.
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
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, which is pretty recent. It used to be really expensive to distribute such a large volume of audio. The old "books on tape" used to cost a lot of money, were frequently abridged, and only existed for the most popular titles.
"It's pronounced Jandalf!"
I don’t think he could be taken seriously with a name like Yandalf.
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.
> 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.
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... ?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
No Professor or "expert" in the Education field ever advanced their own career by advocating for simple & obvious things which actually worked.
/s?
> 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!
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
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, alleé, etc. Since the spoken context for all the conjugations is almost always clear, I'm not sure why someone introduced the extra complexity.
> 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_...
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.
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.
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.
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#Linguis...
> 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 dictées (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.
> 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.
French has much stricter rules, but I could see how the abundance of silent letters would make a spelling bee harder.
French also has some weird gotchas, e.g. "la démocratie" where the spelling represents the word's root rather than pronunciation.
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
Agreed, a far better critique of English spelling:
https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/cha...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you think castle is bad, wait till you hear forecastle (“fok-sul”)
Hahaha. I was not aware of that one. Yes, looks like undecipherable.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Dialects are different since they are still internally consistent.
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"?
(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.
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.
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 Córdoba, 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.
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.
x is pronounced four different ways in Spanish: like j in México, 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.
Well, yes. I was speaking about standard Spanish from Spain.
Xenofobia is an s, yes, and excursión is "ks" In fsct, Méjico 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 "Méjico" myself.
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 México is accepted now.
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.
I get your point, but FWIW, México is not a Mexican deviation; it's just an older Spanish spelling. E.g. Jiménez was once spelled Ximénez and there are probably lots of other examples.
The "root language spoken in its original place" absolutely did pronounce X like modern J.
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
as i understand it, english is actually 3-5 other languages in a trench coat.
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.
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
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.
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.
Let's not downplay the influence that the French language had on English.
> 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.
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
At least 3:
~26% Germanic
~29% Latin
~29% French
~16% Other
RobWords covers this really well: https://youtu.be/PCE4C9GvqI0?si=4Wd6NFus4v1YqmC3
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.
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.
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.
English Orthography doesn't exactly serve native speakers either.
It’s fairly good at helping us understand the etymology. Have a “y” acting as a vowel in the spelling? Good chance it’s Greek. Have a “k”? Almost certainly not Latin.
That is trivia that is useless in almost all contexts. I've been a native English speaker all my life and this is the first I've heard of that. I can't think of any situation in life where knowing that fact would have been helpful. Your claim seems reasonable, but if someone says you are wrong I wouldn't fact check it even if clear links were posted so that I could.
> But English orthography isn't meant to serve foreigners.
Or natives. It is slower for children to learn to read English than other languages.
Teaching my toddler to read now and I definitely feel like if we spoke Spanish my work would be done already.
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)
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.
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?!
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.
> 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.
> 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
The article you linked to specifically says there are only voiceless plosives in Mandarin!
And, you'll notice I pointed out English voiced plosives. :-D
> 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_phonology#Con... .
> 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]).
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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”
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.
The English are definitely characters.
[dead]
English is a particularly challenging language to spell with. How many languages have a national spelling competition?
> Turning 'ti' to /ʃ/ is a fairly normal affricatization
It can't be an affrication, because /ʃ/ is not an affricate. (Although /tj/ is affricated, as /tʃ/ [think "gotcha"] - when you say 'ti', you're referring to words that were pronounced with /s/ rather than /t/.)
Wouldn't /sj/ -> /ʃ/ usually just be called "palatalization"?
(The specific phenomenon in the context of English appears to be called "yod-coalescence".)
As a non native, it still bothers me how "toward" is pronounced, "toord", really?
That's just one accent. Most accents pronounce that W (especially outside the US).
come to texas and experience a whole universe of dipthongs (one of which remedies this)
‘W’ started out as a long ‘U’ so it’s not unreasonable
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.
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").
If you think that’s crazy, consider that “English” is the only word in the English language that spells the /ɪŋ/ (‘ing’) sound as “eng”.
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 /ŋ/ 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 /dʒ/ (like "j" for those who can't read IPA) aren't subject to this.
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.
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.
- English - /ˈɪŋ(ɡ)lɪʃ/
- engage - /ɪnˈɡeɪd͡ʒ/, /ɛnˈɡeɪd͡ʒ/
- engorge - /ɪnˈɡɔːdʒ/
- engross - /ɪnˈɡɹəʊs/, /ɪŋˈɡɹəʊs/, /ɛnˈɡɹoʊs/, /ɛŋˈɡɹoʊs/
- engulf - /ɪŋˈɡʌlf/
According to Wiktionary only engulf and engross also use /ŋ/.
I've never heard engulf pronounced similarly to English
Like others, I don't find that nonsense word particularly enlightening.
But maybe compare '-ough' in: cough, tough, dough, through, plough.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 /ˈsɪŋɚ/ and /ˈfɪŋɡəɹ/ end up?)
English lacking a language regulator makes it hard to be a bootlicker for that particular language. Whose boot are they licking?
The blob's
> 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.
also wound and wound
> 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?
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 /ɪ/ is unrelated.
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!
What was the poem (song?) that captured many more of these? (Anyone?)
The Chaos (1922) by Gerard Nolst Trenité ?
https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/cha...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw (and others similar)
Bingo!
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
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.
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.
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.
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").
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
> to dramatize what would otherwise be a dry spelling shift
I don't think that's how it was developed, though. I really doubt there are real-world cases where cwen was scrubbed and queen written above it (correct me if I'm wrong!).
I think it’s more like “people stopped writing English for time being, only learned to write Norman and Latin, so when they needed to write a word or two, they’s use the spelling they knew. Eventually, this spelling because the way of writing English”.
I don’t think a situation with Godwin is plausible.
> I never realized the irony that English avoids > diacritics because of French influence
I'm not sure that's the best way to put it. Old English also generally didn’t use diacritics (modern texts add them: we’d use cwēn instead of cƿen, but these are modern invention).
So, English didn't use diacritics before Normans, and Normans didn't change this.
Clearly the early scribes were looking forward to the 7-bit ASCII code and needed to reduce the number of characters that were represented.
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.
Only þ (thorn) died with the printing of Caxton's Bible using y-, for cost reasons.
The other letters -- ƿ (wynn), æ (ash), and ð (eth) -- went out of use long before movable type printing. https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/the-lost-letters-of-th...
And long s:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s
AFAIK it was dropped out because the top hook of the long s punch broke easily, and could be easily replaced with a basic s.
Your link says ſ (the long s) didn't disappear (from English) until several hundred years after the movable type printing press and makes no mention of physical problems when using that letter, suggesting instead removal gave a type a more modern feel:
> Pioneer of type design John Bell (1746–1831), who started the British Letter Foundry in 1788, is often "credited with the demise of the long s".[12] Paul W. Nash 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.
If you go early enough, my understanding is that people would write accents in ascii by doing:
e <backspace character> '
Which was called "overstriking".
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).
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.
And probably ‘←’ where we now have ‘_’. Character-generator ICs with the 1963 64-character set hung on around for a couple decades.
If you go back even further, you get the iota subscript [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iota_subscript
Iota subscript is a 12-century invention. Rough and smooth breathings (ἁ for ha, ἀ for a) are much older Greek diacritics.
For another example of classical diacritics, see apices in Latin (á for long a).
All hail the first software engineers of the scriptorium
But they added extra letters to words to make up for lack of number of letters. They'd be fans of utf-8 maybe.
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.
This article is about accents on letters (diacritics), not accents as in dialects.
I found your post interesting neverthelesss.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
suboptimal outcome for sure
Italian script doesn't use diacritics, though, so it's not the same kind of accent as the article talks about.
Italian script most definitely requires diacritics.
"è" (is) vs "e" (and)
"pero" (pear tree) vs "però" (but)
"perché" is the only correct one and "perche" and "perchè" do not exist
and so many other examples.
Oh huh, I've forgotten more Italian than I thought, thanks for the correction!
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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!
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.
And it's great.
My HS Italian teacher's university thesis was on the different dialects within Naples and their various (ancient) Greek origins.
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
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?
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.
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.
Yeah, from near Urbino but moved to USA ~20 years ago.
Same in some parts of Germany. In the area where I grew up in you can tell in which village a person is from just by the way they talk, and the villages are just ~3 km apart!
From what I know this is because it was a relatively remote, dangerous and poor region (all by the standards of hundred years back) which changed ownership a lot (between clergy, bavaria, prussia) and people were mostly left to themselves
'Ennery 'Iggins, is that you?
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.
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)
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. ;)
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.
I am afraid this quote is an urban legend. It never existed.
> 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.
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 inspiré du site de Commarques (sa grotte, son abri troglodyte et son château)[2], tandis que le village de la Roque serait partiellement inspiré de la Roque Saint-Christophe, forteresse troglodyte voisine du château de Commarque. ...
and the location,
> La vallée des Rhunes : inspirée de la vallée des Beunes, et plus précisément 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.
"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.
See also: Jamaican Patois aka speakyspoke
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaican_Patois
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
I studied Anglo-Norman French (circa 1300s), and found it strikingly useful speaking with a woman who worked in the Breton region of France.
> 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.
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.
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?"
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
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.
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.
Well yeah, GP's comment obviously only applies in the case that your native language is not standard Italian.
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
Hah, Barese sounds like a Frenchman is trying to speak Italian but can't be bothered.
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.
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.
The Economist magazine uses a diæresis (two dots) in words like “coöperate” and “reëlect” to indicate that both vowels are pronounced separately, rather than as a diphthong. This is considered old-school and uncommon though.
Unless The Economist does it as well, you were probably thinking of The New Yorker.
https://www.arrantpedantry.com/2020/03/24/umlauts-diaereses-...
Oops I think you are right. My parents subscribed to both and I must have mixed them up.
That is the fun thing about English. There isn't really a single right way to speak or write it. It is defined by common usage. As long as your audience understands you, it is correct.
As someone else pointed out, loan words often have accents. At what point does jalapeño become en english word? There is no other english word to refer to the pepper, therefore it is now an english word and therefore english words can have diacritics.
The closest thing we have to a source of truth for the english language is the OED. It isn't prescriptive, it just lists how words are used rather than how words should be used.
Jalapeño is in the OED with the tilde https://www.oed.com/dictionary/jalapeno_n?tab=factsheet#1253...
> That is the fun thing about English. There isn't really a single right way to speak or write it. It is defined by common usage. As long as your audience understands you, it is correct.
That's how all languages work - to the chagrin of l'Académie Française - English is no special exception.
I like to believe that, by definition, the only person who speaks English properly is the King of England. Everyone else has an accent.
I see naïve as an example of diacritics in English as well.
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.
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.
Learning the relationship between a diæresis and a diphthong and then seeing that the word diæresis contains a diphthong has rounded out my day nicely, thanks for that.
I enjoyed learning recently that the most common diacritics in Czech are the háček and the čárka. The word "háček" has a čárka followed by a háček, while the word "čárka" has a háček followed by by a čárka!
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.
Similarly, a grave accent is sometimes used in poetry to indicate that a single vowel is voiced - e.g. in "cursèd" to indicate that the word should be pronounced as two syllables "curse-ed", rather than a single syllable "curst".
Loanwords often retain their accents as well: cliché, façade, doppelgänger, jalapeño.
But it's habanero, not habañero - people mistakenly put the ñ by analogy with jalapeño.
I’ve always seen it written with an acute accent: ‘curséd.’ Wikipedia notes both usages, but to my knowledge I have never once read a poem which used a grave accent that way.
There’s also the (dying) use of diareses to indicate vowel stress, for example coöperative or naïve.
The adjective "learnèd" (meaning "well-educated") is a native English word that should take the grave accent even outside of poetry. Also "unlearnèd".
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.
You see this in Shakespeare's plays, "-ed" endings are the equivalent of "-èd", whereas "-'d" is pronounced "-ed" as is common today.
I love this, because I always do a double take and start pronouncing it as coOUUUperate and REEEElect, giving me much entertainment (I am easily entertained!).
Edit: also see rôle, which invokes this classic: https://i.redd.it/qrfr7o4ue2z51.jpg
Used to just be a dash, like re-elect. Cooperate was co-operate. People got tired of writing dashes and they got shortened.
That seems like a quirk of the magazine for thsie pstticular words, but its more common for some others like "naïve" and "Zoë", although that's gone out of fashion somewhat since computers took over (and I believe both of those are loan words in english)
Fascinating. I had wrote that off as a bug in their CMS.
Oh interesting, I've never seen those cases. I'd say it's more common (although maybe still a little old-school?) to use it in words like Noël or Chloë.
I don't remember ever seeing that in The Economist.
I think you're thinking of New Yorker magazine, perhaps?
Ai blív ingliš šud imbreis diakritiks, ounli daunsaid ai sí is it wud spel dí end of speling bí kompetišns. Pun intendid.
You don't even use them consistently in the same sentence (your unaccented i has at least 3 different values, for instance).
The real reason English spelling is frozen in the 1600s is that that is the last time all English speakers had a common language community. Since the foundation of the colonies, Englishes have diverged from each other from that starting point, so that no reform can be neutral to all current Englishes - some have merged what was distinct in early modern English (e.g. cot-caught merger); while in other cases what was a single class has been split (e.g. the bath-trap split). Wikipedia has a (non-comprehensive) table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_correspondences_between_... note for example that even where two varieties have merged phonemes, they might have merged them differently (compare Southern American to Australian). You might try to come up with a spelling system that covers all possible combinations, but it would be then very hard for the speakers who have mergers (i.e. all of them) to use - how is an Australian supposed to know which äː vowels are æ in American and which are ɑ? How are the Americans supposed to know which ɑ's are äː vs ɒ in Australia? etc. etc.
Czech diacritics taking over the world :-)
It does sometimes, though its use may mark the author as among the agèd.
Not to mention loanwords, which of course English is full of, and are sometimes considered properly spelt with their original accents, though many will spell them naïvely without.
Diphthongs too, especially in British English, are not just an archæological find, though out of pragmatism usually written digitally with two separate characters.
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.
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.
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.
For me (Brit), ‘program’ is some software and ‘programme’ is a collection of projects, in the project management sense
me too: 'dialog' is a computer popup; 'dialogue' is a verbal exchange
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.
Did you mean misspelled
> 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
> though its use may mark the author as among the agèd
Thirtysomething here. I use diaeresis (a/k/a diæresis) over e.g. coöperate. It’s more concise than a hyphen. And it makes more sense than cooperate, given cooper is a word.
Thirtysomething here too. I see a diaeresis in naïve often enough to remember that it happens yet uncommon enough to be taken by surprise anyway.
So we can use them if you're feeling fancy or writing for The New Yorker
So that it fits into 7-b it ASCII.
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.
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”
Diacritics aren't unambiguous, there are different conventions for using them. What sound does "ā" make? It depends.
If what it depends on is the language then thats trivial.
Why is it trivial?
The ä and a sounds in Swedish and Finnish are swapped; and they're direct neighbours (with compulsory education for Swedish in Finland, no less).
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.
Do you have any examples? As a Finnish speaker the Swedish "a" sounds the same. "Pappa", "framtiden" etc.
It's "ä" and "e" which have swapped uses, but it's not exactly consistent (e.g. "Järnvägstorget" where first ä is close to the Finnish ä, second ä is closer to e but so is the e at the end)
Ä in Swedish is an æ sound.
Ä in Finnish is a pitched A sound, like the A in “cat”.
The pitched “a” in Swedish is the default one.
Wikipedia lists both "cat" and the Finnish "mäki" under æ: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-open_front_unrounded_vo...
Do you have some example words that would show the difference?
Well, mostly hearing people say the words will be telling.
Gävle in Sweden: https://forvo.com/word/g%C3%A4vle/
Linnanmäki 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 “” (maki) which is triggered with umlauts;
Where the Swedish A is softened by umlauts in the Gävle example.
(how did I get downvoted for this when I literally lived in both countries)
not just neighbors by country. a not insignificant proportion of finns speak swedish natively
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
Spanish seems quite decent in both of these aspects.
It's easier than German, but it's still a pain because of gendered nouns. English was right to dump that crap centuries ago.
Indeed!
> 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)
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.
Interesting!
So how do you pronounce comfortable there?
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.
> 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!
Correct. It's "one sound" represented by two letters, but not always the same sound in different words.
Ah, I misunderstood "one sound" as meaning, "these letters only ever produce one sound that is unchanging regardless the word".
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.
But I think its global dominance has more to do with historical and economic factors than linguistic flexibility
French was the lingua franca for a very long time (pun intended)
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.
Yes, the “Franks” in “lingua franca” were mostly Italians.
Another way of saying this is that spoken English has a lot of inbuilt, inherent error correct-ability, ala a very large minimum Hamming distance between spoken words/phrases.
I always found French to be very much the opposite in spoken form, due to the 'consonnes finales muettes' and liaison and élision, along with the large amount of homonyms and general colloquialism used in everyday speech. Yet in written form, it is nearly as straightforward as English, as you get back those damn letters that aren't being spoken.
> I always found French to be very much the opposite in spoken form, due to the 'consonnes finales muettes' and liaison and élision, along with the large amount of homonyms and general colloquialism used in everyday speech.
It is not that different from English in that respect. I found both to be quite difficult compared to e.g. German, which is very regular, or Spanish (which is annoying grammar-wise but straightforward to pronounce).
Spoken English is full of elisions and silent letters, and also full of locale-dependent colloquialisms that take some time getting used to. I remember struggling for a while living in New York and London despite having a decent level in “standard” English. I still occasionally struggle with my mates from Ireland and Yorkshire. After living more than a decade in English-speaking countries I accepted that I will never be able to pronounce correctly a word I never heard before.
Missing liaisons is not problematic when you speak French. It marks you as a non-native but it does not make you harder to understand. They can be often omitted by natives as well, depending on the accent.
English is currently popular because money is always popular
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.
> 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.)
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.
> 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, miúdo 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.
> 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).
> 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.
> 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, ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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
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 )
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.
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.
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
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
> 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".
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.
>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.
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.
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)
French barely has diacritics.
There aren’t that many different diacritics, but every other word has one. Just look at any text in French, it’s full of é, è, ê, and à.
You mean Umlauts?
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.
Computers were not much of a concern in 1887.
As Esperanto was designed to be a neutral language that took words from many (European) languages, it needed an orthography that would unambiguously denote those sounds.
You can trivially transliterate the circumflex letter with digraphs using h anyway. ĝ -> gh
Still perfectly readable.
If you want a language where there is a trivial and unambiguous mapping between written and spoken language and the sounds don't exist in basic latin script, you need to do something. You can use diacritics, you can use digraphs and other tricks or well you just give up. But saying they are "unnecessary complexity" is very mistaken.
Fascinating site...
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.
We are polite and it is considered racist.
The claim that “English doesn’t use accents” is, quite frankly, a bit naïve. After all, one only needs to step into a café for a crème brûlée, or to read a novel featuring a tête-à-tête, to see that English is perfectly comfortable with accented words. From the résumé of a job seeker to the façade of a building, from the attaché case of a businessman to the naïve assumptions of a newcomer, accents are sprinkled throughout our language like so many éclairs in a patisserie. English may not have been born with diacritics, but it has certainly acquired a taste for them.
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.
If I recall correctly, the accent marks only started to get dropped when people began using keyboards. Resumé and fiancée still got an accent when it was handwritten
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.
> 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.