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Why English doesn't use accents
- mikequinlan 1y agoClearly the early scribes were looking forward to the 7-bit ASCII code and needed to reduce the number of characters that were represented.
- bawolff 1y agoIf you go early enough, my understanding is that people would write accents in ascii by doing: e <backspace character> ' Which was called "overstriking".
- PyWoody 1y agoIf you go back even further, you get the iota subscript [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iota_subscript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iota_subscript
- demetrius 1y agoIota 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).
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kps 1y agoYes, 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).
- wanderingstan 1y agoInteresting! 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.
- kps 1y agoAnd probably ‘←’ where we now have ‘_’. Character-generator ICs with the 1963 64-character set hung on around for a couple decades.
- int_19h 1y agoThis comes from typewriters. Curiously, the reason why Esperanto uses Ĉ, Ĝ, Ĥ, Ĵ, and Ŝ is because the circumflex was present on French typewriters (which were very common in Europe at the time). Even though French itself only uses it for Â, Ê, Û - since it was a distinct key used for overtyping, it could be repurposed in this manner, just like Unicode combining marks today.
- mousethatroared 1y agoYou'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.
- eesmith 1y agoOnly 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-the-english-alphabet https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/the-lost-letters-of-th...
- california-og 1y agoAnd long s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
- eesmith 1y agoYour 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.
- california-og 1y agoIt's more of a pet theory I have. The 1787 Printer's grammar mentions the following: "Kerned Letters being attended with more trouble than other Sorts, Founders are sometimes sparing in casting them; whereas they rather require a larger number than their Casting-Bill specifies; considering the chance which Kerned Letters stand, to have their Beaks broke, especially the Roman f, when it stands at the end of a line, where it is exposed to other accidents, besides those from the lye-brush: but in still more danger are Kerned Letters of the Italic; especially d f l, when they stand, with their Beaks unguarded, at the end of lines; and at the beginning of lines, f g j [long s] y run a great hazard; though of these, f and [long s] in particular are most liable to suffer."[0] So, foundries are less likely to cast letters that break easily. This is just 4 years before Bell dropped the long s, so while the other reasons outlined in the Wikipedia are probably the main reasons, I speculate that it was also an economic decision based on them breaking quite easily. Especially when the new "modern" look required ever sharper and finer details. And my point was that it is (partly) this material aspect of typography that contributed to the disappearance of a whole letter from English written language. Doesn't really matter if it's hundreds of years after the "invention" of printing press, it's still related to it. 0: https://archive.org/details/b2876058x/page/41/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/b2876058x/page/41/mode/1up
- KurSix 1y agoAll hail the first software engineers of the scriptorium
- bravesoul2 1y agoBut they added extra letters to words to make up for lack of number of letters. They'd be fans of utf-8 maybe.
- Dwedit 1y agoDiacritics aren't unambiguous, there are different conventions for using them. What sound does "ā" make? It depends.
- Affric 1y agoIf what it depends on is the language then thats trivial.
- dijit 1y agoWhy 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).
- forinti 1y agoBut 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.
- em-bee 1y agonot just neighbors by country. a not insignificant proportion of finns speak swedish natively
- lrasinen 1y agoDo 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)
- dijit 1y agoÄ 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.
- andy99 1y agoI 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.
- boredatoms 1y agoEnglish is currently popular because money is always popular
- dijit 1y agoThis 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.
- lenzm 1y ago> 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, ...
- nicoburns 1y agoThat 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.
- porphyra 1y agoThe 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.
- SnooSux 1y agoUnless The Economist does it as well, you were probably thinking of The New Yorker. https://www.arrantpedantry.com/2020/03/24/umlauts-diaereses-and-the-new-yorker/ https://www.arrantpedantry.com/2020/03/24/umlauts-diaereses-...
- porphyra 1y agoOops I think you are right. My parents subscribed to both and I must have mixed them up.
- nlawalker 1y agoLearning 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.
- schoen 1y agoI 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!
- madcaptenor 1y agoA "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.
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- amelius 1y agoEnglish 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
- knome 1y agoghoti 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.
- salomonk_mur 1y agoRead 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.
- efilife 1y ago[flagged]
- selectodude 1y agoEnglish lacking a language regulator makes it hard to be a bootlicker for that particular language. Whose boot are they licking?
- eviks 1y agoThe blob's
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- OJFord 1y agoIt 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.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> 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.
- krige 1y agoThirtysomething here too. I see a diaeresis in naïve often enough to remember that it happens yet uncommon enough to be taken by surprise anyway.
- GianFabien 1y agoOn 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.
- OJFord 1y agoDid you mean misspelled
- kzrdude 1y ago> 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
- eahm 1y agoFrench.. 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.
- mousethatroared 1y agoAnd it's great. My HS Italian teacher's university thesis was on the different dialects within Naples and their various (ancient) Greek origins.
- megablast 1y ago> 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.
- eahm 1y agoOh 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.
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- every 1y agoFascinating site...
- KurSix 1y agoThe 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
- demetrius 1y ago> 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.
- gwd 1y ago> 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.
- sfg 1y agoAccording 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.
- bravesoul2 1y agoTldr. 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.
- beepboop4000 1y agoWe are polite and it is considered racist.
- dvh 1y agoAi blív ingliš šud imbreis diakritiks, ounli daunsaid ai sí is it wud spel dí end of speling bí kompetišns. Pun intendid.
- cenamus 1y agoCzech diacritics taking over the world :-)
- int_19h 1y agoYou'd be surprised! I actually see a fair amount of haceks hereabouts in PNW because they are used in the orthography of the local Salish Native American languages, so you end up with road signs like these: https://www.charkoosta.com/news/salish-language-stop-signs-erected-at-the-salish-pend-d-oreille-longhouse/article_869d16da-c4bb-11eb-8402-8f74addc1a45.html https://www.charkoosta.com/news/salish-language-stop-signs-e...
- brainwad 1y agoYou 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_English_accents#Vowels 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.
- mgaunard 1y agoFrench barely has diacritics.
- richrichardsson 1y ago> 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!
- whstl 1y agoCorrect. It's "one sound" represented by two letters, but not always the same sound in different words.
- richrichardsson 1y agoAh, I misunderstood "one sound" as meaning, "these letters only ever produce one sound that is unchanging regardless the word".
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- petesergeant 1y agoAs 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.
- namenotrequired 1y agoIt’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”
- jgalt212 1y agoDiacritics 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.
- cardanome 1y agoComputers 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.
- int_19h 1y agoDigraphs can still unambiguously denote sounds, but Zamenhof really wanted the canonical spelling to have one character = one phoneme. And, ironically, it was easier to do it back then compared to the computer age, because typewriters did something similar to Unicode combining marks - specifically, on the French typewriter, you'd have a single key for ^ which was used to overtype letters where circumflex was needed. And since French typewriters were very common in all countries Zamenhof used circumflex for his letters (except Ŭ, seemingly just because). As far as digraphs, using "h" can be ambiguous in some cases, which is why Esperanto digraphs are more often written using "x" these days when diacritics aren't available for some reason. I actually quite like that scheme for several reasons. The obvious one is that "x" is then strictly a modifier letter with no sound value of its own, like hard/soft sign in Cyrillic, so all digraphs are unambiguous. But also, there's a matching diacritical mark, "combining X above". So we could e.g. say that "cx" and "c̽" are the same thing, and you use the latter when possible falling back to the former when you need ASCII.
- jgalt212 1y ago
- nelox 1y agoThe 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.
- pif 1y agoIf 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.
- shakow 1y ago> 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.
- Twirrim 1y agoIn 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.
- speff 1y agoIf 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
- LurkandComment 1y agoYou'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.
- r00f 1y agoI 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.
- koverstreet 1y agoSpanish is a bit tidier with them then French, though
- felipellrocha 1y agoEnglish is your favorite language to read and write? Said no one ever…
- tetraca 1y agoI don't see why it couldn't be. It has a pretty large corpus of decent literature/poetry/other media/etc, and the worst people seem to complain about is its inconsistent spelling rules that even native speakers struggle with. In general I'd rather deal with spell check failing on some common homophone from time to time than say, having to memorize arbitrary genders for inanimate nouns that lack any consistent marker and then tables of grammatical cases to apply on them based on those genders. Or having to shove a verb to the end of a complicated sentence and having to unroll the whole thing to figure out what's being said (not to pick on any particular language(s) I've learned).
- meindnoch 1y agoSo that it fits into 7-b it ASCII.
- Lendal 1y agoTo 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.
- csomar 1y agoI sometimes wonder if English dominated programming and the Internet partly because it doesn't use accents or special characters. You have limited space on a keyboard, and as a native Arabic/French speaker, typing in those languages is a real hassle. French requires é, à, ç and other accents, while Arabic is even more complex with right-to-left text and changing letter forms. English just flows naturally. Maybe the Internet's language wasn't just shaped by politics or economics, but by something as simple as which language was more convenient to type.
- alephnerd 1y agoA much more simpler answer is the fact that much of the tech and ecosystem for computers was developed and commercialized in the US. If Silicon Valley was in France, we'd all be using AZERTY and Minitel.
- athenot 1y agoYes, this is the pragmatic answer. Apple's HyperCard had a French dialect, and AppleScript followed with one too. It was short-lived but did provide a window as to how these programming languages might have looked like had they originated in a non-English world. A fun factoid I just discovered: on March 11, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signs an executive order mandating that ASCII be adopted as a federal information processing standard for electronic data interchange between federal agencies. This order was known as... Executive Order 11110 :)
- ViscountPenguin 1y agoDo you have a source for the executive order claim? I can't find it on this list of executive orders signed by Lydon Johnson, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_executive_actions_by_Lyndon_B._Johnson https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_executive_actions_by... . And as far as I can tell the claim originates on ascii-code.com and spread from there? Googling executive order 11110 gives no primary information. Edit: found it https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/memorandum-approving-the-adoption-the-federal-government-standard-code-for-information https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/memorandum-approvi... It's just not an executive order as far as I can tell. Not an expert on US governance by any means though. Edit 2: I mixed up Executive orders and Actions it seems?
- Xunjin 1y agoA point that is always good to think about, a population defines its language and a language defines its population, it's a symbiotic relationship. The language you speak, will shape how you perceive/interact/understand the world itself.
- cvoss 1y agoDo the tittles on `i` and `j` count as diacritics? In English those vowel symbols never appear without their tittles. (In contrast, the related vowel symbol `y`, which is like an `ij` combo and is named "Greek I" in French, never appears with tittles!) In some sense, the glyphs are idiomatically atomic with the diacritics permanently stuck to them.
- RiverCrochet 1y agoI don't think so; the tittle is part of the lowercase form of the letter. If it was a diacritic, it could appear with the uppercase forms as well.
- dawnofdusk 1y agoIn French you can (and most people do) drop diacritics from all uppercase forms.
- bazoom42 1y agoThey are not diacritics since they don’t alter the sound of the letter.
- cvoss 1y agoI don't know what a headless `i` or `j` would sound like in English, since they aren't used. So it's not really a verifiable claim that the tittles don't alter the sound.
- bazoom42 1y agoThe term “diacritic” has a specific mening. It means a symbol added to a letter to alter or disambiguate its sound. The dot in i and j does not have that function (in English), therefore they are not diacritics but part of the letter itself. The dot evolved to make the letter more visually distinct in handwriting, not to indicate a sound change.
- adolph 1y ago
- owenversteeg 1y agoWe do, of course, use accents and other diacritics. It's not as common as in other languages, but most people will come across a few each day. The popular argument here is that many are French, with the accents optional, yet soupçon and exposé are rarely written naked. If you want non-French, pick up the New Yorker and you will find coöperative and reëlect, or a poem to find changèd and learnèd. We use them in names, from Brontë to Beyoncé. There is an excellent Wikipedia article that goes into detail on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical_marks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical...
- acc_297 1y ago-Naïve- is the example I think I see most often but I think it’s often spelled -naive- and no one would fuss too much with either spelling
- sudobash1 1y agoEnglish still sometimes (albeit very rarely) uses one type of diacritic. The diaeresis is in occasional use. Now days it is mainly used in the word "naïve," but it will be familiar to readers of the New Yorker on words like "coöperate." The diaeresis is used disambiguate when a pair of vowels make two separate vowel-sounds, instead of one. For instance, if you didn't know better, you would think that the words "naive" and "nave" (said "nāv", the congregational of a traditional church) were homophones. But the diaeresis shows you that the "a" and "i" are said independently (nah-ēv). Of course, English also uses diacritics occasionally in some borrowed words: résumé, née, fiancée/fiancé. But these are also considered optional.
- gavinward 1y ago> if you didn't know better It's funny how The New Yorker clings to this given its readership is mostly people who absolutely do know better.
- renox 1y agoFrom the article >> The use of diacritics arises out of a mismatch between an alphabet and the language it’s being used to write: if an alphabet were well adapted to a language, it would have letters for all the language’s sounds. << and then it use 'ç' as an example even though French has 's' for the same sound, amusing.