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But even though English, Spanish, Dutch, German and French are written with the same 26 characters and a handful of diacritics, the sounds (phonemes) are quite
by tgv 4y ago
But even though English, Spanish, Dutch, German and French are written with the same 26 characters and a handful of diacritics, the sounds (phonemes) are quite different. Transcription doesn't have to be 1:1, although it would be nice if it weren't as messy as English. And the Latin alphabet is certainly no worse than Cyrillic or Arabic. Look how Czech manages its various phonemes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_language#Orthography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_language#Orthography.
- gumby 4y agoIt's a matter of attitude. The German umlaut and ß are basically contractions (ß ambiguously less so); accents in French change pronunciation and/or semantics (French circumflex shows where a no longer pronounced letter used to be) while in Spanish they only denote atypical stress (which can disambiguate an otherwise homonym), similar to the Vietnamese use where they are pretty explicitly phonic in nature. While in, say, Swedish, letters like Å, Ä and Ö (and, to this non-swede, arguably W) are diacritically-marked letters that became fully-fledged ones, like mitochondria becoming "part of a cell". Actually the swedish alphabet is remarkable to me in that it preserves many otherwise useless letters like Q and Swedish orthography is quite tolerant of the use of non-letters like á ("non-letter" meaning "not part of the official alphabet"). The only diacritic used in English, the diaresis, is clearly completely optional and I suspect many people go through their entire lives without encountering it!
- 082349872349872 4y agoThe diaeresis is no longer preëminent, but if we coöperate in reïgniting usage maybe we can reënter it in quotidian use?