13 ms·

A fascinating subject, and there's an extension of it about which I've been curious for years, it's why English doesn't use diacritics or accents on alphabetica

A fascinating subject, and there's an extension of it about which I've been curious for years, it's why English doesn't use diacritics or accents on alphabetical characters as do many European languages—French, German, etc. For instance, in French the letter 'e' can take four forms—without accent, grave è, acute/aigu é, circumflex ê. This makes the letter much more flexible and greatly assists with pronunciation. So why doesn't English use them? It's clear the language needs them with words such as through, thorough and thought which are confusing enough for native speakers let alone those learning English as a second language. And how about inconsistencies such as the verb to lead and the metal Pb lead, or other strange 'gh' words such as cough? Similarly, proper nouns such as Wycombe, Warwick, etc. defy logic when it comes to pronunciation and would greatly benefit from diacritical marks. I've never considered myself a particularly good speller and I reckon I would have benefited from diacritics had English used them.

Obscurity4340 3y ago
I wonder if the dot above 'i's and 'j's are in some sense a diacritic or like "1/2 of one"
NeoTar 3y ago
It’s a fascinating subject. I think a lot of the English peculiarities with spelling come from it adopting other vocabulary without enforcing a change to English orthography onto it, so we end up with a crazy mix of Germanic, French, Latin, Greek and other language spelling conventions. Also English speakers were perhaps more willing to coin Latin/Greek terms for new objects than other languages - contrast ‘television’ from Greek and Latin in English, with Fernseher (literally far-looker) in German. With respect to dialectical marks, I’m not sure why English in general doesn’t use them (although some might argue we do if we spell words café or naïve), but they don’t seem to be ‘fashionable’ in related languages - Dutch doesn’t seem to use them either, and in German they feel somewhat optional - ä, ö and ü can be replaced with ae, oe and ue respectively (e.g. where the accented forms aren’t available) and ß can be replaced with ss. Indeed correct alphabetical sorting of German demands this.
- euroderf 3y ago
  > contrast ‘television’ from Greek and Latin in English I recall reading somewhere that back in the day, there were complaints that this new word coinage "television" would never catch on specifically because it mixed Greek and Latin.
- jl6 3y ago
  > dialectical marks Of course dialectical Marx is something else entirely.
  - wahern 3y ago
    I wonder how personalized are autocompletions on Android and iPhone. How strongly could we infer, if at all, that someone had used the term dialectical before? Are autocompletions personalized enough that they might suggest dialectical over diacritic because someone had used (or received!) words like Hegel or capitalism? (Or maybe we could merely only infer someone's phone is using a European English word probability database as in European discourse dialectics might be even more common than diacritics. ;)
- hunter2_ 3y ago
  > naïve There are actually a good number of words that historically used a diaeresis in English, especially up until about a century ago: noël, reëlect, reënter, Chloë, Zoë, noöne, preëmpt, daïs, coöperate, coöpt, coördinate, zoölogy... The idea was to ensure that the second vowel would be seen as its own syllable.
  - satiric 3y ago
    I'll give the obligatory comment about the New Yorker magazine, which still uses these diaereses... for some reason.
    - adastra22 3y ago
      Because the spelling would otherwise be ambiguous.
lainga 3y ago
Don't quote me on this, but I vaguely recall an explanation years ago, that the one-two punch of Norman French and the Great Vowel Shift arriving were enough for spelling and pronounciation to permanently decouple in English speakers' minds
- housecarpenter 3y ago
  What I've heard is that it was Johnson's dictionary.
nh23423fefe 3y ago
But people don't read letter by letter to recognize a word. The vast majority of readers are fluent and are seeing a word for the 1000th time. Optimizing for foreign learners instead of native adults seems wrong. Words vary in pronunciation across time and across regions and dialects. I would assume those words "used to" (which doesn't sound like it has a 'd') sound like they were written. So what would you do, rewrite the dictionary every couple centuries for zero gain?
- bojan 3y ago
  Maybe one of the reasons the pronunciation varies across time and regions is exactly because the pronunciation rules aren't really standardized, so people can get creative. I wonder if the languages with strict pronunciation rules tend to change less. In my native language we tend to get new words of course, but if I read a text from 100 years ago I will be able to pronounce every word correctly, even if the word is now archaic and fallen out of use. I might get the accent wrong, and indeed accents do vary across regions, and sometimes even between neighboring towns.
  - nh23423fefe 3y ago
    That reason doesn't make sense, because pronunciation has always varied across time and most people were illiterate in the past. the written word, is not the normative form of a language. words aren't made of letters, and letters aren't made of sounds.
notaustinpowers 3y ago
It's hard to know for absolutely certain, but a lot of it might be because diacritics would just make English even harder to read/write. By the invention of printing, English was a very confusing mess of the germanic and romantic languages and there was no absolute agreement on pronunciation. Plus, we were in the middle of the great vowel shift, so slapping diacritics on letters would have been a fools errand since they wouldn't sound like that diacritic says they do. English's lax pronunciation, linguistic changes during the middle ages, and strong romantic language influence, would make it even more confusing to create solid rules on diacritic usage, especially as many people would still be illiterate, and English was an "easier" language than the very complex Latin.
idoubtit 3y ago
I don't have a definite answer on why some writing systems decide to use diacritics why other don't. I'm not sure there is a single reason for English. But I think a bit of historical context would help. Many European languages derive from Latin, and most other were influenced and borrowed its alphabet. Latin didn't have diacritics, despite having pronunciation accents. E.g. "mania" could mean "mănia" (madness) or "mānia" (a kind of spirit). With time, many short vowels disappeared or changed, e.g. "orphănus" became "orphenin" then "orphelin" in French. I suppose that, for languages that are mostly an evolution of Latin, introducing diacritics was a way to mark words that were different from Latin words. It was even more useful because Latin was the written standard (a moving standard across centuries). By the way, French and English are languages were you can't be sure of the pronunciation of a word you've never seen. Some studies have shown that other languages are much more efficient to read and write. For instance, Spanish readers barely slow down when reading a text that contains rare words, while English readers stumble. I remember stumbling when I first encountered "antienne" in my native language, or "recipe" and "gaol" in English.
- seszett 3y ago
  > French and English are languages were you can't be sure of the pronunciation of a word you've never seen. English yes of course, but French pronunciation is very regular and only a few loanwords don't follow the rules. "Antienne" is regular and pronounced the same way all other -tienne words are as far as I know (like, say, Étienne). The most difficult rules to master though are those that take into account the origin of a word (Latin, Greek or a Germanic language), especially for how to pronounce "ch", but these are essentially loanwords. The reverse is not true though, there are many different potential ways to write a word that produce the same pronunciation.
  - wongarsu 3y ago
    > The reverse is not true though, there are many different potential ways to write a word that produce the same pronunciation. For any "real" language it's probably impossible to have a 1-1 mapping in both directions. French tries really hard to embed everything required for pronunciation in the spelling, but because of dialects and phonetic drift that leads to some pronunciations having multiple viable spellings. German seems more concerned with the other direction: for each pronunciation (in high German) there is one obvious way to spell it (barring some baggage around c/k/ck and s/ss/ß, but even that has rules that can be applied to mostly clear it up). The other direction also mostly works, the spelling-pronunciation mapping is fairly obvious even if you don't know the word, but it is more ambiguous than French (no way to differentiate e è é or ê; and ë is mostly inferred). English somehow seems to neither try to maintain a consistent spelling-pronunciation mapping nor a pronunciation-spelling mapping, nor a tradeoff between the two. At least unless you know the origin of the word and are aware of pertinent linguistic history of the last ~200 years, or develop a good heuristic understanding for those. Probably because of the amount of coordination required to maintain a decent mapping in either direction. Both France and Germany have influential central control on spelling.
Merrill 3y ago
It would be nice if word processors had a feature to translate documents to International Phonetic Alphabet. Your second paragraph would be: səʊ waɪ dʌznt ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ juːz ðɛm? ɪts klɪə ðə ˈlæŋɡwɪʤ niːdz ðɛm wɪð wɜːdz sʌʧ æz θruː, ˈθʌrə ænd θɔːt wɪʧ ɑː kənˈfjuːzɪŋ ɪˈnʌf fɔː ˈneɪtɪv ˈspiːkəz lɛt əˈləʊn ðəʊz ˈlɜːnɪŋ ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ æz ə ˈsɛkənd ˈlæŋɡwɪʤ. ænd haʊ əˈbaʊt ˌɪnkənˈsɪstᵊnsiz sʌʧ æz ðə vɜːb tuː liːd ænd ðə ˈmɛtᵊl Pb liːd, ɔːr ˈʌðə streɪnʤ 'gh' wɜːdz sʌʧ æz kɒf?
- adamrezich 3y ago
  I think I can speak for many many people who casually read Wikipedia articles by asking: how does one go about practically learning the IPA, so as to be able to read (not even write) something like that? every time I come across a Wikipedia article that uses IPA to explain pronunciation, it's wholly inscrutable gibberish, completely useless if there isn't a listen-to-someone-saying-it button.
  - akavi 3y ago
    Just like you learn anything else. Flash cards, pure repeated exposure, reading about the symbols long enough that you have a framework to fit them into, etc.
    - meepmorp 3y ago
      Transcription practice really helped me associate IPA with speech sounds.
  - RandallBrown 3y ago
    Usually those pronunciations are also links to the IPA helper page. I've used it to figure out pronunciations in the past.
  - hunter2_ 3y ago
    https://itinerarium.github.io/phoneme-synthesis/ https://itinerarium.github.io/phoneme-synthesis/
  - 3y ago
jcranmer 3y ago
English spelling becomes a lot more rational [1] when you understand that you are spelling words largely according to Middle English. Sound changes that occur after that are largely not reflected in English spelling. As for why English doesn't use diacritics, well, my hypothesis is that Middle English just didn't need them. Per the Wikipedia article on Middle English phonology, there's 5 short vowels + unstressed vowel + 7 long vowels + diphthonging with /j/ or /w/. With just 5 short vowels, it's possible to write every one with the 5 basic vowels of Latin script, and the long vowels and diphthongs can be written with paired vowels, using different vowels for the extra long vowel sounds (cf. ee versus ea)--no need for diacritics, even if it is a little clumsy. The Great Vowel Shift came along and fucked up all the long vowels, and separate changes caused "a" to break into 2-3 sounds (crowding into the "o" sound, as well), leaving us with clearly multiple sounds for the same short "a" and "long" vowel spellings that bare little to no resemblance to their corresponding pronunciations. Some of the sounds (in particular, ee and ea) merged into one sound as part of the Great Vowel Shift, too. [1] The other thing that ruins English spelling is a proclivity to borrow foreign words with foreign pronunciation and foreign spellings (even if it's not written in Latin script!), so to some extent, you have to play a guessing game as to etymology to work out spelling. But ignoring those cases, you can actually pretty reliably work out the pronunciation of most English words by effectively applying the (mostly regular) phonological changes from Middle English.
- marktani 3y ago
  very interesting! can you share a couple examples of words borrowed with foreign, non-Latin script? I'm having trouble imagining how this could look like
  - jcranmer 3y ago
    Words like 'manga' or 'anime' come from Japanese (written in kanji) or Greek words like onomatopoeia (Greek is a different alphabet from Latin) are ones that come to mind.
    - P-Nuts 3y ago
gumby 3y ago
If you think of english spelling as highly conservative (it is) and only casually connected to pronunciation (an overstatement, but true) the spelling isn't so bad. The conservatism preserves meaning which is lost in languages like German where spelling is periodically "reformed", severing spelling from a word's historical semantics. You could just as well consider words like "debt", "lead" or "Wycombe" to be kanjis, and nobody complains about their disconnect from pronunciation.
- saithound 3y ago
  > You could just as well consider words like "debt", "lead" or "Wycombe" to be kanjis, and nobody complains about their disconnect from pronunciation. Back in the day, I spent a couple of years teaching in a high school, which exposed me to a fairly large group of Australians of Japanese descent who were learning Japanese as a second language. They did complain about it, and quite fiercely, especially the ones learning it due of family pressure, and not innate interest. If most people don't complain, I guess it's because a.) they have no exposure to kanji in the first place, b.) they grew up with it, or c.) because their environment regards it as culturally insensitive to complain about foreign writing systems. If none of these apply, you do seem to get plenty of complaints. None of these factors hold for English, so it makes sense that people complain about the spelling.
cryptonector 3y ago
IIRC Benjamin Franklin tried to make use of diacritics in his (U.S.) newspaper, and it didn't fly. English could use a spelling simplification, but it's not going to happen -- it's too late and there's too much inertia in the current way of doing things. Also, FYI, the circumflex in ê in French isn't there to change how e is pronounced but to denote that after the e there used to be an s that has been dropped, and that's how it always is for the circumflex accent in French. Sure, être is not pronounced the same as it would be were it written as etre, but I think that's accidental and not really the essence of the circumflex accent in French.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > English could use a spelling simplification, but it's not going to happen Sure it is, continuously and gradually. > Also, FYI, the circumflex in ê in French isn't there to change how e is pronounced but to denote that after the e there used to be an s that has been dropped, and that's how it always is for the circumflex accent in French. Sure, être is not pronounced the same as it would be were it written as etre, but I think that's accidental and not really the essence of the circumflex accent in French. IIRC, and its been a long time since I studied French or made use of anything but the the most basic bits, for each vowel there is a consistent (in the general case, but there may be exceptions) pronunciation change associated with the now-elided “s”, so the circumflex serves both historical and phonetic purposes.
  - cryptonector 3y ago
    > Sure it is, continuously and gradually. There has been no success to any attempts to regularize the spelling of English in... what, over a century now? Is the New Yorker still the only major publication insisting on using umlauts? :) I'm not saying that English won't evolve, mind you, only that English spelling will evolve [a lot] more slowly than the rest of the language. > IIRC, and its been a long time since I studied French or made use of anything but the the most basic bits, for each vowel there is a consistent (in the general case, but there may be exceptions) pronunciation change associated with the now-elided “s”, so the circumflex serves both historical and phonetic purposes. Wikipedia says it alters the sound of a, e, and o. But I would pronounce château and chateau substantially the same. I would pronounce fantôme slightly differently from fantome. Être and etre, on the other hand, would have substantially different pronunciations.
The_Colonel 3y ago
German is frustrating for its underuse of diacritics - e.g. tetragraph "tsch" representing a single sound, similar for "sch". In Czech, these are č and š respectively. Polish has similar issues, resulting in the infamous "spilled letters" orthography.
- gsich 3y ago
  'Q' could be used for that in German. Rename all other words.
  - The_Colonel 3y ago
    Q has a different pronunciation - e. g. quasi, Quatsch...
    - gsich 3y ago
      Yes. Can be changed to make space for a sch-letter. kwasi, kwatsch.
      - The_Colonel 3y ago
        Changing the pronunciation of an existing letter seems ... unnecessary. German already has diacritics, it can simply adopt more of them.
        gsich 3y ago
        It has been done before. Diacritics suck, German does not use them thankfully.
6510 3y ago
My theory is that one needs a good reason to cross the ocean. Life has to be better on the other side. It is a selection process. You get people who's hands and feet tend to follow their thoughts as opposed to writing them down.
WalterBright 3y ago
English's lack of them greatly assisted alphabets like RADIX-50 for earlier computers. Typewriters, too.
- satiric 3y ago
  Apparently this was one of the major barriers to achieving widespread adoption of computers in China. The sheer complexity of the Chinese written language meant that it was much harder to display Chinese characters on an old 80s monitor. (I assume that Japanese, Korean, etc had the same problem, but the article I remember reading was about Chinese.)
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    I read once that the Japanese invented the fax machine as a workaround for difficulties transmitting the character set.
laserDinosaur 3y ago
My personal pet peeve with the English language is the placement of symbols at the end of a sentence which change the inflection of the sentence? Oh that was a question, I guess you didn't know until you got to the very end of the sentence! Yes I was shouting that whole time, I guess you didn't know. I find oh so irritating when reading books and not knowing the inflection of the characters speech until the END of the sentence. I much prefer how other languages put a symbol at the start and end of the sentence. Grumble grumble.
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
Economy of printing press blocks, and diacritics wouldn't be enough to cover the wide variety of pronunciations, which is inconsistent in English, as highlighted by Wycombe and Warwick. Diacritics wouldn't save those names.
nick__m 3y ago
A little nitpick,there are 5 "forms" for 'e' in French, you forgot ë it is used in words like Noël and België
atkailash 3y ago
[dead]
thaumasiotes 3y ago
> For instance, in French the letter 'e' can take four forms—without accent, grave è, acute/aigu é, circumflex ê. This makes the letter much more flexible and greatly assists with pronunciation. The circumflex is not related to pronunciation; it tells you that in the historical form of the word an S followed the vowel. The other three are just three different French vowels. It's an odd conflation of concerns. > Similarly, proper nouns such as Wycombe, Warwick, etc. defy logic when it comes to pronunciation and would greatly benefit from diacritical marks. Same problem; diacritical marks aren't what you want there. What's happening is that the spelling has changed more slowly than the pronunciation. You don't want to disambiguate the pronunciation of Warwick (between what and what?), what you want is to realize that the spelling isn't trying to tell you how it's pronounced. It's telling you how it used to be pronounced. (Though, in that case, it's not at all difficult to predict the modern pronunciation.)
- adastra22 3y ago
  Sometimes there are cercumflexed vowels that change pronunciation. My assumption is that these vowels were accented, but you could only have one diacritic.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    Wikipedia says this about modern French spelling: > An acute accent over ⟨e⟩ represents /e/ > A grave accent over ⟨e⟩ indicates /ɛ/ in positions where a plain ⟨e⟩ would be pronounced /ə/ (schwa). > A circumflex over ⟨a, e, o⟩ indicates /ɑ, ɛ, o/, respectively, but the distinction between ⟨a⟩ /a/ vs. ⟨â⟩ /ɑ/ is being lost in Parisian French, merging them as [a]. In Belgian French, ⟨ê⟩ is pronounced [ɛː]. Most often, it indicates the historical deletion of an adjacent letter (usually ⟨s⟩ or a vowel): château < castel, fête < feste, sûr < seur, dîner < disner (in medieval manuscripts many letters were often written as diacritical marks, e.g. the circumflex for ⟨/s/⟩ and the tilde for ⟨/n/⟩). What I can take from that (lacking detailed knowledge of French) is that ê always refers to the same vowel as è (with a length distinction in Belgian French), and sometimes, in contexts which defy simple description†, e refers to the same vowel. (The vowel in question is similar to that in the English word DRESS.) è is used to avoid the suggestion that a plain e might be read in the default way, as /ə/, and ê is used to remind you that the word used to contain an s. It does not appear that a circumflex will generically clobber other accent information; the verb "listen" was formerly escouter and now, pronounced with /e/ and not /ɛ/, is spelled écouter according to the pronunciation rather than êcouter according to the etymology. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_orthography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_orthography ) If you have a particular example in mind that the treatment of modern French doesn't seem to work for, Wikipedia also has a lot of material on sound changes between Latin and French: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_French https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_French † The page has a table of how to predict the pronunciation of unaccented "e". These are the listed exceptions to the default reading: (a) "e" appears before multiple consonants, or before a double consonant, or before a silent consonant that is followed by t. (b) "e" appears before a silent consonant that is not t and is not followed by t. (c) "e" appears at the end of a word, except for some (but not all) one-syllable words. In some contexts, those non-exceptional one-syllable words will also be exceptions. (d) "e" as it appears in the words et, femme (first position), solennel (first position), or any word ending in the suffix -emment (first position). A context that doesn't match any of these exceptions, including the unspecified exceptions, calls for a grave accent over the e when the vowel is /ɛ/. Otherwise, you're good to just use e. All this leaves me unenthusiastic about the concept of "make it easier to pronounce unfamiliar words by making your spelling more like French".

Obscurity4340 3y ago

I wonder if the dot above 'i's and 'j's are in some sense a diacritic or like "1/2 of one"

NeoTar 3y ago

It’s a fascinating subject. I think a lot of the English peculiarities with spelling come from it adopting other vocabulary without enforcing a change to English orthography onto it, so we end up with a crazy mix of Germanic, French, Latin, Greek and other language spelling conventions. Also English speakers were perhaps more willing to coin Latin/Greek terms for new objects than other languages - contrast ‘television’ from Greek and Latin in English, with Fernseher (literally far-looker) in German. With respect to dialectical marks, I’m not sure why English in general doesn’t use them (although some might argue we do if we spell words café or naïve), but they don’t seem to be ‘fashionable’ in related languages - Dutch doesn’t seem to use them either, and in German they feel somewhat optional - ä, ö and ü can be replaced with ae, oe and ue respectively (e.g. where the accented forms aren’t available) and ß can be replaced with ss. Indeed correct alphabetical sorting of German demands this.

euroderf 3y ago
> contrast ‘television’ from Greek and Latin in English I recall reading somewhere that back in the day, there were complaints that this new word coinage "television" would never catch on specifically because it mixed Greek and Latin.
jl6 3y ago
> dialectical marks Of course dialectical Marx is something else entirely.
- wahern 3y ago
  I wonder how personalized are autocompletions on Android and iPhone. How strongly could we infer, if at all, that someone had used the term dialectical before? Are autocompletions personalized enough that they might suggest dialectical over diacritic because someone had used (or received!) words like Hegel or capitalism? (Or maybe we could merely only infer someone's phone is using a European English word probability database as in European discourse dialectics might be even more common than diacritics. ;)
hunter2_ 3y ago
> naïve There are actually a good number of words that historically used a diaeresis in English, especially up until about a century ago: noël, reëlect, reënter, Chloë, Zoë, noöne, preëmpt, daïs, coöperate, coöpt, coördinate, zoölogy... The idea was to ensure that the second vowel would be seen as its own syllable.
- satiric 3y ago
  I'll give the obligatory comment about the New Yorker magazine, which still uses these diaereses... for some reason.
  - adastra22 3y ago
    Because the spelling would otherwise be ambiguous.

lainga 3y ago

Don't quote me on this, but I vaguely recall an explanation years ago, that the one-two punch of Norman French and the Great Vowel Shift arriving were enough for spelling and pronounciation to permanently decouple in English speakers' minds

housecarpenter 3y ago
What I've heard is that it was Johnson's dictionary.

nh23423fefe 3y ago

But people don't read letter by letter to recognize a word. The vast majority of readers are fluent and are seeing a word for the 1000th time. Optimizing for foreign learners instead of native adults seems wrong. Words vary in pronunciation across time and across regions and dialects. I would assume those words "used to" (which doesn't sound like it has a 'd') sound like they were written. So what would you do, rewrite the dictionary every couple centuries for zero gain?

bojan 3y ago
Maybe one of the reasons the pronunciation varies across time and regions is exactly because the pronunciation rules aren't really standardized, so people can get creative. I wonder if the languages with strict pronunciation rules tend to change less. In my native language we tend to get new words of course, but if I read a text from 100 years ago I will be able to pronounce every word correctly, even if the word is now archaic and fallen out of use. I might get the accent wrong, and indeed accents do vary across regions, and sometimes even between neighboring towns.
- nh23423fefe 3y ago
  That reason doesn't make sense, because pronunciation has always varied across time and most people were illiterate in the past. the written word, is not the normative form of a language. words aren't made of letters, and letters aren't made of sounds.

notaustinpowers 3y ago

It's hard to know for absolutely certain, but a lot of it might be because diacritics would just make English even harder to read/write. By the invention of printing, English was a very confusing mess of the germanic and romantic languages and there was no absolute agreement on pronunciation. Plus, we were in the middle of the great vowel shift, so slapping diacritics on letters would have been a fools errand since they wouldn't sound like that diacritic says they do. English's lax pronunciation, linguistic changes during the middle ages, and strong romantic language influence, would make it even more confusing to create solid rules on diacritic usage, especially as many people would still be illiterate, and English was an "easier" language than the very complex Latin.

idoubtit 3y ago

I don't have a definite answer on why some writing systems decide to use diacritics why other don't. I'm not sure there is a single reason for English. But I think a bit of historical context would help. Many European languages derive from Latin, and most other were influenced and borrowed its alphabet. Latin didn't have diacritics, despite having pronunciation accents. E.g. "mania" could mean "mănia" (madness) or "mānia" (a kind of spirit). With time, many short vowels disappeared or changed, e.g. "orphănus" became "orphenin" then "orphelin" in French. I suppose that, for languages that are mostly an evolution of Latin, introducing diacritics was a way to mark words that were different from Latin words. It was even more useful because Latin was the written standard (a moving standard across centuries). By the way, French and English are languages were you can't be sure of the pronunciation of a word you've never seen. Some studies have shown that other languages are much more efficient to read and write. For instance, Spanish readers barely slow down when reading a text that contains rare words, while English readers stumble. I remember stumbling when I first encountered "antienne" in my native language, or "recipe" and "gaol" in English.

seszett 3y ago
> French and English are languages were you can't be sure of the pronunciation of a word you've never seen. English yes of course, but French pronunciation is very regular and only a few loanwords don't follow the rules. "Antienne" is regular and pronounced the same way all other -tienne words are as far as I know (like, say, Étienne). The most difficult rules to master though are those that take into account the origin of a word (Latin, Greek or a Germanic language), especially for how to pronounce "ch", but these are essentially loanwords. The reverse is not true though, there are many different potential ways to write a word that produce the same pronunciation.
- wongarsu 3y ago
  > The reverse is not true though, there are many different potential ways to write a word that produce the same pronunciation. For any "real" language it's probably impossible to have a 1-1 mapping in both directions. French tries really hard to embed everything required for pronunciation in the spelling, but because of dialects and phonetic drift that leads to some pronunciations having multiple viable spellings. German seems more concerned with the other direction: for each pronunciation (in high German) there is one obvious way to spell it (barring some baggage around c/k/ck and s/ss/ß, but even that has rules that can be applied to mostly clear it up). The other direction also mostly works, the spelling-pronunciation mapping is fairly obvious even if you don't know the word, but it is more ambiguous than French (no way to differentiate e è é or ê; and ë is mostly inferred). English somehow seems to neither try to maintain a consistent spelling-pronunciation mapping nor a pronunciation-spelling mapping, nor a tradeoff between the two. At least unless you know the origin of the word and are aware of pertinent linguistic history of the last ~200 years, or develop a good heuristic understanding for those. Probably because of the amount of coordination required to maintain a decent mapping in either direction. Both France and Germany have influential central control on spelling.

Merrill 3y ago

It would be nice if word processors had a feature to translate documents to International Phonetic Alphabet. Your second paragraph would be: səʊ waɪ dʌznt ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ juːz ðɛm? ɪts klɪə ðə ˈlæŋɡwɪʤ niːdz ðɛm wɪð wɜːdz sʌʧ æz θruː, ˈθʌrə ænd θɔːt wɪʧ ɑː kənˈfjuːzɪŋ ɪˈnʌf fɔː ˈneɪtɪv ˈspiːkəz lɛt əˈləʊn ðəʊz ˈlɜːnɪŋ ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ æz ə ˈsɛkənd ˈlæŋɡwɪʤ. ænd haʊ əˈbaʊt ˌɪnkənˈsɪstᵊnsiz sʌʧ æz ðə vɜːb tuː liːd ænd ðə ˈmɛtᵊl Pb liːd, ɔːr ˈʌðə streɪnʤ 'gh' wɜːdz sʌʧ æz kɒf?

adamrezich 3y ago
I think I can speak for many many people who casually read Wikipedia articles by asking: how does one go about practically learning the IPA, so as to be able to read (not even write) something like that? every time I come across a Wikipedia article that uses IPA to explain pronunciation, it's wholly inscrutable gibberish, completely useless if there isn't a listen-to-someone-saying-it button.
- akavi 3y ago
  Just like you learn anything else. Flash cards, pure repeated exposure, reading about the symbols long enough that you have a framework to fit them into, etc.
  - meepmorp 3y ago
    Transcription practice really helped me associate IPA with speech sounds.
- RandallBrown 3y ago
  Usually those pronunciations are also links to the IPA helper page. I've used it to figure out pronunciations in the past.
- hunter2_ 3y ago
  https://itinerarium.github.io/phoneme-synthesis/ https://itinerarium.github.io/phoneme-synthesis/
- 3y ago

jcranmer 3y ago

English spelling becomes a lot more rational [1] when you understand that you are spelling words largely according to Middle English. Sound changes that occur after that are largely not reflected in English spelling. As for why English doesn't use diacritics, well, my hypothesis is that Middle English just didn't need them. Per the Wikipedia article on Middle English phonology, there's 5 short vowels + unstressed vowel + 7 long vowels + diphthonging with /j/ or /w/. With just 5 short vowels, it's possible to write every one with the 5 basic vowels of Latin script, and the long vowels and diphthongs can be written with paired vowels, using different vowels for the extra long vowel sounds (cf. ee versus ea)--no need for diacritics, even if it is a little clumsy. The Great Vowel Shift came along and fucked up all the long vowels, and separate changes caused "a" to break into 2-3 sounds (crowding into the "o" sound, as well), leaving us with clearly multiple sounds for the same short "a" and "long" vowel spellings that bare little to no resemblance to their corresponding pronunciations. Some of the sounds (in particular, ee and ea) merged into one sound as part of the Great Vowel Shift, too. [1] The other thing that ruins English spelling is a proclivity to borrow foreign words with foreign pronunciation and foreign spellings (even if it's not written in Latin script!), so to some extent, you have to play a guessing game as to etymology to work out spelling. But ignoring those cases, you can actually pretty reliably work out the pronunciation of most English words by effectively applying the (mostly regular) phonological changes from Middle English.

marktani 3y ago
very interesting! can you share a couple examples of words borrowed with foreign, non-Latin script? I'm having trouble imagining how this could look like
- jcranmer 3y ago
  Words like 'manga' or 'anime' come from Japanese (written in kanji) or Greek words like onomatopoeia (Greek is a different alphabet from Latin) are ones that come to mind.
  - P-Nuts 3y ago

gumby 3y ago

If you think of english spelling as highly conservative (it is) and only casually connected to pronunciation (an overstatement, but true) the spelling isn't so bad. The conservatism preserves meaning which is lost in languages like German where spelling is periodically "reformed", severing spelling from a word's historical semantics. You could just as well consider words like "debt", "lead" or "Wycombe" to be kanjis, and nobody complains about their disconnect from pronunciation.

saithound 3y ago
> You could just as well consider words like "debt", "lead" or "Wycombe" to be kanjis, and nobody complains about their disconnect from pronunciation. Back in the day, I spent a couple of years teaching in a high school, which exposed me to a fairly large group of Australians of Japanese descent who were learning Japanese as a second language. They did complain about it, and quite fiercely, especially the ones learning it due of family pressure, and not innate interest. If most people don't complain, I guess it's because a.) they have no exposure to kanji in the first place, b.) they grew up with it, or c.) because their environment regards it as culturally insensitive to complain about foreign writing systems. If none of these apply, you do seem to get plenty of complaints. None of these factors hold for English, so it makes sense that people complain about the spelling.

cryptonector 3y ago

IIRC Benjamin Franklin tried to make use of diacritics in his (U.S.) newspaper, and it didn't fly. English could use a spelling simplification, but it's not going to happen -- it's too late and there's too much inertia in the current way of doing things. Also, FYI, the circumflex in ê in French isn't there to change how e is pronounced but to denote that after the e there used to be an s that has been dropped, and that's how it always is for the circumflex accent in French. Sure, être is not pronounced the same as it would be were it written as etre, but I think that's accidental and not really the essence of the circumflex accent in French.

dragonwriter 3y ago
> English could use a spelling simplification, but it's not going to happen Sure it is, continuously and gradually. > Also, FYI, the circumflex in ê in French isn't there to change how e is pronounced but to denote that after the e there used to be an s that has been dropped, and that's how it always is for the circumflex accent in French. Sure, être is not pronounced the same as it would be were it written as etre, but I think that's accidental and not really the essence of the circumflex accent in French. IIRC, and its been a long time since I studied French or made use of anything but the the most basic bits, for each vowel there is a consistent (in the general case, but there may be exceptions) pronunciation change associated with the now-elided “s”, so the circumflex serves both historical and phonetic purposes.
- cryptonector 3y ago
  > Sure it is, continuously and gradually. There has been no success to any attempts to regularize the spelling of English in... what, over a century now? Is the New Yorker still the only major publication insisting on using umlauts? :) I'm not saying that English won't evolve, mind you, only that English spelling will evolve [a lot] more slowly than the rest of the language. > IIRC, and its been a long time since I studied French or made use of anything but the the most basic bits, for each vowel there is a consistent (in the general case, but there may be exceptions) pronunciation change associated with the now-elided “s”, so the circumflex serves both historical and phonetic purposes. Wikipedia says it alters the sound of a, e, and o. But I would pronounce château and chateau substantially the same. I would pronounce fantôme slightly differently from fantome. Être and etre, on the other hand, would have substantially different pronunciations.

The_Colonel 3y ago

German is frustrating for its underuse of diacritics - e.g. tetragraph "tsch" representing a single sound, similar for "sch". In Czech, these are č and š respectively. Polish has similar issues, resulting in the infamous "spilled letters" orthography.

gsich 3y ago
'Q' could be used for that in German. Rename all other words.
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  Q has a different pronunciation - e. g. quasi, Quatsch...
  - gsich 3y ago
    Yes. Can be changed to make space for a sch-letter. kwasi, kwatsch.
    - The_Colonel 3y ago
      Changing the pronunciation of an existing letter seems ... unnecessary. German already has diacritics, it can simply adopt more of them.
      - gsich 3y ago
        It has been done before. Diacritics suck, German does not use them thankfully.

6510 3y ago

My theory is that one needs a good reason to cross the ocean. Life has to be better on the other side. It is a selection process. You get people who's hands and feet tend to follow their thoughts as opposed to writing them down.

WalterBright 3y ago

English's lack of them greatly assisted alphabets like RADIX-50 for earlier computers. Typewriters, too.

satiric 3y ago
Apparently this was one of the major barriers to achieving widespread adoption of computers in China. The sheer complexity of the Chinese written language meant that it was much harder to display Chinese characters on an old 80s monitor. (I assume that Japanese, Korean, etc had the same problem, but the article I remember reading was about Chinese.)
- WalterBright 3y ago
  I read once that the Japanese invented the fax machine as a workaround for difficulties transmitting the character set.

laserDinosaur 3y ago

My personal pet peeve with the English language is the placement of symbols at the end of a sentence which change the inflection of the sentence? Oh that was a question, I guess you didn't know until you got to the very end of the sentence! Yes I was shouting that whole time, I guess you didn't know. I find oh so irritating when reading books and not knowing the inflection of the characters speech until the END of the sentence. I much prefer how other languages put a symbol at the start and end of the sentence. Grumble grumble.

VoodooJuJu 3y ago

Economy of printing press blocks, and diacritics wouldn't be enough to cover the wide variety of pronunciations, which is inconsistent in English, as highlighted by Wycombe and Warwick. Diacritics wouldn't save those names.

nick__m 3y ago

A little nitpick,there are 5 "forms" for 'e' in French, you forgot ë it is used in words like Noël and België

atkailash 3y ago

[dead]

thaumasiotes 3y ago

> For instance, in French the letter 'e' can take four forms—without accent, grave è, acute/aigu é, circumflex ê. This makes the letter much more flexible and greatly assists with pronunciation. The circumflex is not related to pronunciation; it tells you that in the historical form of the word an S followed the vowel. The other three are just three different French vowels. It's an odd conflation of concerns. > Similarly, proper nouns such as Wycombe, Warwick, etc. defy logic when it comes to pronunciation and would greatly benefit from diacritical marks. Same problem; diacritical marks aren't what you want there. What's happening is that the spelling has changed more slowly than the pronunciation. You don't want to disambiguate the pronunciation of Warwick (between what and what?), what you want is to realize that the spelling isn't trying to tell you how it's pronounced. It's telling you how it used to be pronounced. (Though, in that case, it's not at all difficult to predict the modern pronunciation.)

adastra22 3y ago
Sometimes there are cercumflexed vowels that change pronunciation. My assumption is that these vowels were accented, but you could only have one diacritic.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  Wikipedia says this about modern French spelling: > An acute accent over ⟨e⟩ represents /e/ > A grave accent over ⟨e⟩ indicates /ɛ/ in positions where a plain ⟨e⟩ would be pronounced /ə/ (schwa). > A circumflex over ⟨a, e, o⟩ indicates /ɑ, ɛ, o/, respectively, but the distinction between ⟨a⟩ /a/ vs. ⟨â⟩ /ɑ/ is being lost in Parisian French, merging them as [a]. In Belgian French, ⟨ê⟩ is pronounced [ɛː]. Most often, it indicates the historical deletion of an adjacent letter (usually ⟨s⟩ or a vowel): château < castel, fête < feste, sûr < seur, dîner < disner (in medieval manuscripts many letters were often written as diacritical marks, e.g. the circumflex for ⟨/s/⟩ and the tilde for ⟨/n/⟩). What I can take from that (lacking detailed knowledge of French) is that ê always refers to the same vowel as è (with a length distinction in Belgian French), and sometimes, in contexts which defy simple description†, e refers to the same vowel. (The vowel in question is similar to that in the English word DRESS.) è is used to avoid the suggestion that a plain e might be read in the default way, as /ə/, and ê is used to remind you that the word used to contain an s. It does not appear that a circumflex will generically clobber other accent information; the verb "listen" was formerly escouter and now, pronounced with /e/ and not /ɛ/, is spelled écouter according to the pronunciation rather than êcouter according to the etymology. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_orthography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_orthography ) If you have a particular example in mind that the treatment of modern French doesn't seem to work for, Wikipedia also has a lot of material on sound changes between Latin and French: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_French https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_French † The page has a table of how to predict the pronunciation of unaccented "e". These are the listed exceptions to the default reading: (a) "e" appears before multiple consonants, or before a double consonant, or before a silent consonant that is followed by t. (b) "e" appears before a silent consonant that is not t and is not followed by t. (c) "e" appears at the end of a word, except for some (but not all) one-syllable words. In some contexts, those non-exceptional one-syllable words will also be exceptions. (d) "e" as it appears in the words et, femme (first position), solennel (first position), or any word ending in the suffix -emment (first position). A context that doesn't match any of these exceptions, including the unspecified exceptions, calls for a grave accent over the e when the vowel is /ɛ/. Otherwise, you're good to just use e. All this leaves me unenthusiastic about the concept of "make it easier to pronounce unfamiliar words by making your spelling more like French".