4 ms·
Usually the diacritics exist because of something that is contrastive in the language's phonology. This post is mainly about a concrete example of this, where p
by schoen 9y ago
Usually the diacritics exist because of something that is contrastive in the language's phonology. This post is mainly about a concrete example of this, where pączki and
paczki refer to two different things that a shop could sell. So it's super-helpful that shops can make that distinction in writing!
Or for example
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair#Stress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair#Stress
In Portuguese, my strongest foreign language, I can think of examples like
a 'the (feminine)' / à 'at the (feminine)'
nó 'knot' / no 'in the'
dá 'gives' / da 'of the'
nós 'we' / nos 'in the (plural)'
sê 'I should be' / se 'oneself' / sé 'see (Catholic)'
pode 'can' / pôde 'could (past)'
avô 'grandfather' / avó 'grandmother'
tem 'he/she has' / têm 'they have'
among many others.
At least a couple of these reflect vowel differences, although some would be homophones in speech. Every language that holds on to diacritics would have pairs like this where the diacritics make a difference to the meaning. So people may really appreciate having writing systems that can reflect these differences in order to avoid confusions that would otherwise occur.
- zokier 9y agoObviously naively just stripping diacritics won't work. But that doesn't mean that diacritics are the only option for orthography; for example in nordics ä and ö (or the equivalent norwegian/danish ones) could be substituted with ae and oe, because those do not occur otherwise in the language, and so the orthography remains unambiguous. Maybe a good example of related development is the disappearance of Þ (thorn) from english orthography, being replaced with th.
- jdmichal 9y agoFun fact: The Germanic umlaut symbol actually developed from placing a small "e" above the vowel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_%28diacritic%29#History_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_%28diacritic%29#Hist...
- schoen 9y ago> Maybe a good example of related development is the disappearance of Þ (thorn) from english orthography, being replaced with th. This didn't have quite the full benefit that you describe, though, because of compound words like "cathouse", "hothouse", "lighthouse", "outhouse", etc. And of course digraphs can be extra-risky whenever languages accept loanwords.