7 ms·

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 t

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.
  - masklinn 3y ago
    It's also that french and german have somewhat purer linguistic roots, english started as a west germanic language, got admixtures of old norse, followed by massive injections of french and latin (roughly a quarter of the modern vocabulary, each), and uncontrolled pronunciation shifts. Written old english was quite regular and phonetically sound. It also had a fair number of diacritics (after latinisation). > For any "real" language it's probably impossible to have a 1-1 mapping in both directions. I understand korean is rather good in that perspective, but also that it has a relatively simple phonology and the korean script is constructed, it was designed from scratch for korean. Interestingly and not dissimilar to TFA's assertions, for a very long time it was only used by the common class and disdained by the aristocracy, 19th century nationalism and separation from china led to its revival.
    - ochrist 3y ago
      It's a bit more complicated than that: https://brill.com/view/journals/ldc/6/1/article-p1_1.xml?language=en https://brill.com/view/journals/ldc/6/1/article-p1_1.xml?lan...
  - Sharlin 3y ago
    > For any "real" language it's probably impossible to have a 1-1 mapping in both directions. As far as I know, Finnish is very very close to 100% phonetic: one letter, one phoneme, with some slight exceptions and some wiggle room when it comes to dialectical variation and loanwords, especially those with nonnative phonemes like /b/ or /g/. The velar nasal ŋ is the biggest exception, featuring in "nk" and "ng" (like in many other languages) and the rules aren't entirely straightforward. Another exception is that in spoken language a glottal stop or gemination can appear at some morpheme boundaries but isn't reflected in written text.
    - skydhash 3y ago
      Haitian Creole is like this. There are a few phonemes that are represented by two letters, but the distinction is there both in writing and in speech.
- cryptonector 3y ago
  The rules of pronunciation in French are... hard to describe. Maybe it's because French is a natal language for me. I mean, how do you explain oeuf vs. oeufs? No, French has lots of particularities to it, just not as many as English. Spelling in French is definitely a lot more regular than in English, but the rules of spelling in French have lots of exceptions anyways (e.g., all words that start with 'af' have a double 'f' except [long list of words like afrique]).
  - Quekid5 3y ago
    > I mean, how do you explain oeuf vs. oeufs? Just like 'hour' and 'our' in English I assume. They just happened to sound exactly alike for different(?) reasons. EDIT: Probably similar reasons, actually? The "h" here participates in in a vowel sound (effectively silencing it) and the 's' suffix is often (but not always!) silent in French? Spelling is a tension between going purely for sounding things out (e.g IPA) and being able to find commonality with other pronunciations (dialects spoken by neighboring peoples), etc. It's going to get ad hoc because people.
    - adastra22 3y ago
      Hour and our are not pronounced the same, at least not in American English.
      - jghn 3y ago
        They can be. Depends on the person/region.
      - Quekid5 3y ago
        Do you have an example accent/dialect? I'm honestly curious, because I can't think of any... but then I'm neither a Brit nor an American, so... :)
        adastra22 3y ago
        I’m a California native. “Hour” in my dialect is like “ow-er” where the first sound is like the beginning of “ouch!” but it is distinctly two sounds. “Our” is a single sound very close to “are”.
- tharkun__ 3y ago
  I always found it weird how English seems to basically consist of only exceptions and yet it is so much easier to learn and master than French. At least from my experience as a non-native speaker of either. And I say that as a native speaker of a very very regular language. I always felt like in French you never know how to write something. And seeing it written you sort of leave out the last three or four or maybe none of the letters when speaking but you never really know from just seeing it written. Depends on if you are speaking or singing too. An Edith Piaf will sing French like it's German and pronounce every letter. But you're not supposed to. And don't get me started on Monsieur. I mean come on, it basically is "my sir" i.e. "mon sieur". But you say "miss" (speak this as an English word) "yeux" (speak this as the French word for "eyes") and if you tell this to a French person they look at you like you are trying to kill them. And in the end it does all sort of make sense and they all are intertwined. Like "have" and "habe" and "a". (English, German and French). If you take a French person trying to pronounce either the English or German word you basically are left with just the "a" if you try to write the word down from someone saying it. "h" is mue. And then you leave out the last few letters. French people have a hard time saying "have" or "habe" properly.
  - hilbert42 3y ago
    "And I say that as a native speaker of a very very regular language." And what language is that? "I always felt like in French you never know how to write something." Similarly, I've had friends and colleagues who are native German speakers and they've also had one hell of a difficulty in learning French, seemingly more so than native English speakers despite them being reasonably fluent in English. Maybe understanding English is easier for them because of its Germanic roots which are largely absent in French. Perhaps native English speakers find learning French easier because English is a sort of bastard language that's also part French. I'd be interested to hear from others who've had similar experiences.
    - tharkun__ 3y ago
      Wasn't it William the Conqueror who made French the language of the English court? That's how English has quite some French influence too or so I've heard. Of course neither side will want to speak much of it. Nor will the English want to speak much of the quite German blood influence of the Royals and how the English behaved at the start of WWII. It's just all so mixed up through history. It's weird how German and French are actually close in that they have quite extensive and regular grammar and genders, like Latin and if you translate French word for word to German, it sometimes sounds like someone is just speaking weirdly structured middle ages German or something and is actually understandable. Of course only in writing, since the pronunciation is "very French" :) And then there's Dutch which takes lots of English words and pronounces them a bit more German or takes German words and pronounces them quite English and then that's called Dutch (not to take anything away of course, there are completely Dutch words that aren't like that).
- idoubtit 3y ago
  > "Antienne" is regular and pronounced the same way all other -tienne words are as far as I know (like, say, Étienne). There is nothing regular here, since most dictionaries have no other common noun with the same ending. For instance the famous Littré only has "antienne" and "laurentienne", the latter with a "s" pronunciation. As for the rare words ending in "-tien" (and "-tienne" for feminine adjectives), roughly half of them are pronounced "t" and the others "s". E.g. "chrétien", "tien" (and derivatives like "entretien", "maintien"), against "béotien", "capétien", "égyptien". So, in French, in the words "chrétienne" and "égyptienne", the "t" is pronounced "t" only with the former word, even if both words have their origin in Greek through Latin.
litoE 3y ago
"The New Yorker" magazine uses umlauts to mark the different pronunciations of doubled vowels. The write "cöoperate" to distinguish the way you pronounce its double o from the sound of the double o in "chicken coop".
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- o11c 3y ago
  It should always be the second vowel in English I think. There are 3 accents that see use in native English: * the diaeresis (äëïöüÿ) or trema (in French influence), indicates that a vowel that should start its own syllable (that is, turning 1 syllable into 2, thus the name), not be a diphthong. Nowadays usually a hyphen is used instead, or (especially in American English) removed entirely for words that have become common. Most commonly this is 'oö' or 'eë', but others exist e.g. "naïve". This is not to be confused with the German umlaut, which does something completely different and is not productive in English. * the acute (áéíóúý) indicates an alternate pronunciation (or occasionally stress) of the vowel compared to the usual rules (especially if there's a homonym); there is no consistency in what that alternate is (since many English vowels have 3 or more pronunciations). Sometimes this can create a syllable where there was none, but normally it leaves the syllable count unchanged. The usual example is "résumé"; most other examples are for words derived from French where French had it, but it gets used for other languages that didn't have one too ("saké" and "Pokémon" from Japanese, "maté" via Spanish). I can't think of examples in "native" words (barring trademarks, but I don't think any of those have genericized), but if you go back far enough, aren't they all loanwords? Certainly many of the words that this applies to aren't very foreign anymore. * the grave (àèìòùỳ) is used in poetry to force an extra syllable that would not be used in prose. By far this is most commonly for a past participle like "blessèd", but the rule is productive and can be used on any vowel. "Learnèd" is a weird example where the pronunciation changes even in prose (for the adjective sense), but the accent is usually only in poetry still.

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.
- masklinn 3y ago
  It's also that french and german have somewhat purer linguistic roots, english started as a west germanic language, got admixtures of old norse, followed by massive injections of french and latin (roughly a quarter of the modern vocabulary, each), and uncontrolled pronunciation shifts. Written old english was quite regular and phonetically sound. It also had a fair number of diacritics (after latinisation). > For any "real" language it's probably impossible to have a 1-1 mapping in both directions. I understand korean is rather good in that perspective, but also that it has a relatively simple phonology and the korean script is constructed, it was designed from scratch for korean. Interestingly and not dissimilar to TFA's assertions, for a very long time it was only used by the common class and disdained by the aristocracy, 19th century nationalism and separation from china led to its revival.
  - ochrist 3y ago
    It's a bit more complicated than that: https://brill.com/view/journals/ldc/6/1/article-p1_1.xml?language=en https://brill.com/view/journals/ldc/6/1/article-p1_1.xml?lan...
- Sharlin 3y ago
  > For any "real" language it's probably impossible to have a 1-1 mapping in both directions. As far as I know, Finnish is very very close to 100% phonetic: one letter, one phoneme, with some slight exceptions and some wiggle room when it comes to dialectical variation and loanwords, especially those with nonnative phonemes like /b/ or /g/. The velar nasal ŋ is the biggest exception, featuring in "nk" and "ng" (like in many other languages) and the rules aren't entirely straightforward. Another exception is that in spoken language a glottal stop or gemination can appear at some morpheme boundaries but isn't reflected in written text.
  - skydhash 3y ago
    Haitian Creole is like this. There are a few phonemes that are represented by two letters, but the distinction is there both in writing and in speech.
cryptonector 3y ago
The rules of pronunciation in French are... hard to describe. Maybe it's because French is a natal language for me. I mean, how do you explain oeuf vs. oeufs? No, French has lots of particularities to it, just not as many as English. Spelling in French is definitely a lot more regular than in English, but the rules of spelling in French have lots of exceptions anyways (e.g., all words that start with 'af' have a double 'f' except [long list of words like afrique]).
- Quekid5 3y ago
  > I mean, how do you explain oeuf vs. oeufs? Just like 'hour' and 'our' in English I assume. They just happened to sound exactly alike for different(?) reasons. EDIT: Probably similar reasons, actually? The "h" here participates in in a vowel sound (effectively silencing it) and the 's' suffix is often (but not always!) silent in French? Spelling is a tension between going purely for sounding things out (e.g IPA) and being able to find commonality with other pronunciations (dialects spoken by neighboring peoples), etc. It's going to get ad hoc because people.
  - adastra22 3y ago
    Hour and our are not pronounced the same, at least not in American English.
    - jghn 3y ago
      They can be. Depends on the person/region.
    - Quekid5 3y ago
      Do you have an example accent/dialect? I'm honestly curious, because I can't think of any... but then I'm neither a Brit nor an American, so... :)
      - adastra22 3y ago
        I’m a California native. “Hour” in my dialect is like “ow-er” where the first sound is like the beginning of “ouch!” but it is distinctly two sounds. “Our” is a single sound very close to “are”.
tharkun__ 3y ago
I always found it weird how English seems to basically consist of only exceptions and yet it is so much easier to learn and master than French. At least from my experience as a non-native speaker of either. And I say that as a native speaker of a very very regular language. I always felt like in French you never know how to write something. And seeing it written you sort of leave out the last three or four or maybe none of the letters when speaking but you never really know from just seeing it written. Depends on if you are speaking or singing too. An Edith Piaf will sing French like it's German and pronounce every letter. But you're not supposed to. And don't get me started on Monsieur. I mean come on, it basically is "my sir" i.e. "mon sieur". But you say "miss" (speak this as an English word) "yeux" (speak this as the French word for "eyes") and if you tell this to a French person they look at you like you are trying to kill them. And in the end it does all sort of make sense and they all are intertwined. Like "have" and "habe" and "a". (English, German and French). If you take a French person trying to pronounce either the English or German word you basically are left with just the "a" if you try to write the word down from someone saying it. "h" is mue. And then you leave out the last few letters. French people have a hard time saying "have" or "habe" properly.
- hilbert42 3y ago
  "And I say that as a native speaker of a very very regular language." And what language is that? "I always felt like in French you never know how to write something." Similarly, I've had friends and colleagues who are native German speakers and they've also had one hell of a difficulty in learning French, seemingly more so than native English speakers despite them being reasonably fluent in English. Maybe understanding English is easier for them because of its Germanic roots which are largely absent in French. Perhaps native English speakers find learning French easier because English is a sort of bastard language that's also part French. I'd be interested to hear from others who've had similar experiences.
  - tharkun__ 3y ago
    Wasn't it William the Conqueror who made French the language of the English court? That's how English has quite some French influence too or so I've heard. Of course neither side will want to speak much of it. Nor will the English want to speak much of the quite German blood influence of the Royals and how the English behaved at the start of WWII. It's just all so mixed up through history. It's weird how German and French are actually close in that they have quite extensive and regular grammar and genders, like Latin and if you translate French word for word to German, it sometimes sounds like someone is just speaking weirdly structured middle ages German or something and is actually understandable. Of course only in writing, since the pronunciation is "very French" :) And then there's Dutch which takes lots of English words and pronounces them a bit more German or takes German words and pronounces them quite English and then that's called Dutch (not to take anything away of course, there are completely Dutch words that aren't like that).
idoubtit 3y ago
> "Antienne" is regular and pronounced the same way all other -tienne words are as far as I know (like, say, Étienne). There is nothing regular here, since most dictionaries have no other common noun with the same ending. For instance the famous Littré only has "antienne" and "laurentienne", the latter with a "s" pronunciation. As for the rare words ending in "-tien" (and "-tienne" for feminine adjectives), roughly half of them are pronounced "t" and the others "s". E.g. "chrétien", "tien" (and derivatives like "entretien", "maintien"), against "béotien", "capétien", "égyptien". So, in French, in the words "chrétienne" and "égyptienne", the "t" is pronounced "t" only with the former word, even if both words have their origin in Greek through Latin.

litoE 3y ago

"The New Yorker" magazine uses umlauts to mark the different pronunciations of doubled vowels. The write "cöoperate" to distinguish the way you pronounce its double o from the sound of the double o in "chicken coop".

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
o11c 3y ago
It should always be the second vowel in English I think. There are 3 accents that see use in native English: * the diaeresis (äëïöüÿ) or trema (in French influence), indicates that a vowel that should start its own syllable (that is, turning 1 syllable into 2, thus the name), not be a diphthong. Nowadays usually a hyphen is used instead, or (especially in American English) removed entirely for words that have become common. Most commonly this is 'oö' or 'eë', but others exist e.g. "naïve". This is not to be confused with the German umlaut, which does something completely different and is not productive in English. * the acute (áéíóúý) indicates an alternate pronunciation (or occasionally stress) of the vowel compared to the usual rules (especially if there's a homonym); there is no consistency in what that alternate is (since many English vowels have 3 or more pronunciations). Sometimes this can create a syllable where there was none, but normally it leaves the syllable count unchanged. The usual example is "résumé"; most other examples are for words derived from French where French had it, but it gets used for other languages that didn't have one too ("saké" and "Pokémon" from Japanese, "maté" via Spanish). I can't think of examples in "native" words (barring trademarks, but I don't think any of those have genericized), but if you go back far enough, aren't they all loanwords? Certainly many of the words that this applies to aren't very foreign anymore. * the grave (àèìòùỳ) is used in poetry to force an extra syllable that would not be used in prose. By far this is most commonly for a past participle like "blessèd", but the rule is productive and can be used on any vowel. "Learnèd" is a weird example where the pronunciation changes even in prose (for the adjective sense), but the accent is usually only in poetry still.