7 ms·

I 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 bir

• felipellrocha 1y ago
  English is your favorite language to read and write? Said no one ever…
  • tetraca 1y ago
    I 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).
    • rrgok 1y ago
      Oh thank god, someone said it. Who cares if "tree" is masculine or feminine, it does not give my any information. In Italian, tree is a masculine word: what can I do knowing "tree" is masculine?
      • trealira 1y ago
        Grammatical gender can serve as disambiguation. I just heard this sentence recently while watching something in Spanish: "No me compares con alguien como tú, que llegaste aquí de una isla oriental sólo porque te impresionó un espectáculo de magia barato." In the phrase "un espectáculo de magia barato," which means "cheap magic show" here, you can tell from the genders of the nouns and adjectives that it's that "barato" modifies "espectáculo," meaning that the show is cheap and it's not that the magic is cheap. It's not that useful here, because it's not hard to figure out the correct meaning from the context anyway, but it's a tool that helps clarity regardless. And when you learn a language well enough, it's not like you're thinking about this super consciously, you just know the word and gendering it and its adjectives flows right off your tongue. I think this is probably easier for a non-native to learn than all the irregular spellings of English, but I wouldn't know, being a native English speaker.
        • WorldMaker 1y ago
          It seems like we can invent better checksums and referents than grammatical gender. Arguably that's a fascinating part of the pronoun discussions in English, being one of the last remaining bastions of grammatical gender in English (that and familial relationship words). I don't expect us to invent better things at all quickly, but it seems worth trying and it is interesting seeing various experiments. One of the things I liked in studying lojban (a conlang of interesting background) was the use of mathematical identifiers as pronouns and "math genders" more related to linguistic role, referents like "the first noun", "the third verb" as pronouns. Referring to things by number is particularly great either, but it was interesting seeing a different approach to it. Similarly, I think the language with the best pronouns I've experienced is ASL (American Sign Language). Signed languages have the ability to use three dimensional space in ways to anchor references that are impractical in spoken languages but so useful in signed languages.
  • zahlman 1y ago
    Just because something is complete nonsense, doesn't mean it can't be enjoyable.
    • ARandomerDude 1y ago
      I think English makes a lot of sense, but only if you invest the time to learn some of its etymology. Knowing some Latin, German, and Greek roots (in that order) is immensely helpful. You don't have to learn those languages per se, just some of the vocab. Eventually, you can look at a word, know if it's Latin/French, Germanic, or Greek in origin and all the spelling rules make much more sense. This takes a lot of time, effort, and interest however, which is why many (most?) people think English is nonsensical.
      • wink 1y ago
        You can also have a (maybe wrong) sense of familiarity that feels like it makes sense. I'm ESL but after so many years of daily contact I find writing stuff in English easier than in my native German. Never lived anywhere else. I'm not claiming it's free of errors but it just feels like less work.
    • throaway5454 1y ago
      None of English is nonsense. But without diacritics, you need to know the historical contexts behind the different spelling or pronunciations to understand the rules.
  • louthy 1y ago
    It is my favourite language to read and write. I am English though.
• koverstreet 1y ago
  Spanish is a bit tidier with them then French, though
• johnnyjeans 1y ago
  2nding this. The "non-phonetic alphabet" is the biggest non-issue I see people raise a stink about. It really doesn't matter, context is the heavy-weight backbone of language. On top of that, I think people really underestimate how inappropriate diacritics would be for English. It has a massive phonemic inventory, with 44 unique items. Compare with Spanish's 24. English's "phonetic" writing system would have to be as complex as a romanized tonal language like Mandarin (which has to account for 46 unique glyphs once you account for 4 tones over 6 vowels + the 22 consonants). Or you know, the absolute mess that is romanization of Afro-Asiatic languages. El 3arabizi daiman byi5ali el siza yid7ako, el Latin bas nizaam kteebe mish la2e2 3a lugha hal2ad m3a2ade.
  • williamdclt 1y ago
    > The "non-phonetic alphabet" is the biggest non-issue I see people raise a stink about Myself and many friends who aren’t native have struggled with speaking fluently because of it. Most of us still mispronounce some words (my friend pronounced “draught beer” like the lack of rain, instead of like draft). Doesn’t mean things should change, but it’s certainly not a “non-issue”
    • JambalayaJimbo 1y ago
      How would you account for the fact that for many words, there isn't a consistent pronunciation rule for it at all? For example, I would guess that 50% of English speakers are non-rhotic.
      • bcatanzaro 1y ago
        English pronunciation does vary quite widely and it would be difficult to rewrite all the books and websites into all the different accents. It's also decentralized - there's no authority to tell the English-speaking community how to spell things or how to say things. I think these are both advantages that outweigh the phonetic inconsistency.
      • williamdclt 1y ago
        To be clear, I'm not particularly advocating for making english a phonetic language. I'm just saying it being non-phonetic does cause issues (and makes it frustrating, but also shows a very interesting history). Assuming we wanted to make English a phonetic language, then your question is kind of moot: phonetic means we need to pick the pronunciation rules for phonemes, which would make other ways to pronounce these phonemes incorrect. Some of currently-correct english would become incorrect english. > For example, I would guess that 50% of English speakers are non-rhotic Note that accent isn't really what people talk about when they complain about pronunciation. The problem is that there's no mapping from letters to phoneme in any english accent: laughter/slaughter, draught/draught, G(a)vin/D(a)vid...
• mamonoleechi 1y ago
  Accents in french are pretty irrelevant, you can totally ignore them and master the language. Most french people ignore them while chatting/mailing/texting online. If you ignore accents, some words can be mistaken for other words (with different accents), but if you check the context, the problem quickly go away. Accents are just useful to help you pronounce correctly words ; they are also a hint about the word's origin (ex: ^ means the words is greek) ; I don't get why it stopped you from learning the language.
  • williamdclt 1y ago
    > Accents in french are pretty irrelevant, you can totally ignore them and master the language. Most french people ignore them while chatting/mailing/texting online. “Master” would definitely not be correct, but you could write intelligibly enough indeed. It will cause you issues here and there (not being taken seriously, having some miscommunications when the diacritic disambiguates the word…) If you can’t read the diacritics though, you’ll pronounce words very incorrectly and French is a very unforgiving language for mispronunciation: you will simply not be understood
    • dragonmost 1y ago
      I feel not being understood when pronunciation is off is more of a France french issue. You will be understood eitherway in Canada (given you speak with french Canadians). But I sometime have difficulty being understood by frenchmans, less so with other french speaking cultures
      • gnubison 1y ago
        It would be like a speaker who can’t distinguish the uh sound in “but” with the ih sound in “bit”. Is it really the native English speaker’s fault if he can’t understand that personal dialect? France’s vowel inventory is bigger than (or just as big as) English’s, and it has a lot more homophones. I imagine all the context goes toward disambiguating the actual homophones and not the arbitrary sets of words foreigners can’t pronounce because they don’t want to learn the accents (the system is not that hard and completely predictable).
• lucasoshiro 1y ago
  > excessive writing marks In English I need to find how each word is pronounced individually. What the hell is the difference between "men" and "man"? What's the difference between "bitch" and "beach"? Why "though" sounds closer to "throw" than "through" or "thought"? Those differences are encoded in a unclear way that there are more exceptions than rules. Portuguese (my native language) is not perfect in that sense, but at least it has more rules than exceptions. Part of that is because we use the diacritic marks. Then, I prefer excessive writing marks than excessive unclear special cases
  • nemonemo 1y ago
    How can writing marks help in this regard? I can imagine a language with both a lot of exceptions and writing marks.
    • stouset 1y ago
      Accent marks give additional phonetic information.
    • stevedzreams 1y ago
      because you know the stress syllable by looking at the word. take Desert and Dessert, do we say DES-ert or des-ERT. Also in portuguese, at least, I can know which "e" sound [1] each "e" in the word makes by knowing this (well, almost, but not completely, but much better than English.) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio
    • lucasoshiro 1y ago
      In Portuguese, they indicate that a syllable is stressed and alternate ways to say the vowels. e.g. "país" is stressed in "i" and means "country", while "pais" is stressed in "a" and means "parents". Tilde (~) indicates that the vowel is nasal, e.g. the "ã" in "São Paulo" means that it sounds like the "u" in "sun"; the default sound of "a" in Portuguese is the same as in "car".
  • darrenf 1y ago
• foobiekr 1y ago
  Agreed. Honestly you don’t even need most punctuation. In about five minutes any literate English speaker can learn to read at full speed with no spaces or other punctuation. Or upside down. Or at an almost arbitrary angle. I taught myself this when I was learning Japanese 30 years ago to prove a point. Now it’s merely an interesting trick but one with an interesting staying power: with zero practice I maintain the ability.
  • chuckadams 1y ago
    Punctuation was indeed a later addition to Latin, as well as lowercase letters.
• Aardwolf 1y ago
  Also agree, you can already use combinations of multiple characters to define other sounds, and that's faster to type too Shame, though, that in English the sounds that combinations of characters make, aren't well or uniquely defined (e.g. bird, word, hurt, heard, herd, ... all sound like the same vowel)
  • Tadpole9181 1y ago
    They're faster to type largely because your keyboard is English. Other languages (French, German, etc) have diacritics right there. Even Japanese isn't that much harder to type once you actually learn it (and, on fact, is quite pleasant on a smartphone even at beginner level). On the topic of similar word sounds, this is a big thing that hangs up English speakers on romantic languages. Their vowels are sloppy and contextual, so when they're given explicit symbols that say "use this vowel", they struggle to pick that vowel out. That "symbol to sound" wiring isn't up in the noggin'. A Spanish person learning English will see the Spanish equivalent and go "duh". But an English speaker needs those "like in bird" tables. Luckily, we have a huge phonemic index (because of all the stealing), so we're actually at an advantage from many languages once that hurdle is crossed. Spare tonality.
    • trueismywork 1y ago
      But that's the point, each language has its own diacritics. There can never be a standard set..
• sotix 1y ago
  You can always tell someone who is well read in English when they mispronounce everything they say. Greek is so much easier than English to pronounce words correctly.
  • hbn 1y ago
    If anything, I'd guess that when speaking English as second language, harder than knowing the accents on words would just be keeping track of all the exceptions in pronunciation between words that you basically just have to memorize. Tough, though, taught, thought, through, thorough, throughout, etc.
    • sotix 1y ago
      My Greek teacher had trouble with early and yearly
  • ASalazarMX 1y ago
    Coming from Spanish, with just the right diacritics to make pronunciation obvious, at first I didn't get the concept of a "Spelling Bee". Did it involve something besides spelling? Did "Bee" was a metaphor for the actual hard part of it? I was first exposed to written English, so after trying conversational English, I learned why its pronunciation/writing is a national competition. It might as well be random. English would have benefited a great deal from an equivalent to the Royal Spanish Academy.
    • tracker1 1y ago
      Possibly... English has a lot of linguistics with a lot of varied roots. You have many words taken from Old Norse and other Scandinavian influence as well as Latin, French and via proxy Greek derived words. Great Britain was highly fought over, contested, changed hands and merged cultures over the millennia. It is far more organic and mixed from different sources than many prescribed languages or very local dialects of other languages. It would be very hard to pin that down. Not to mention the history of printing presses themselves, such as how the Thorn character was itself replaced as well as deprecating a few other characters that were in common use in earlier Old English.
• jsbg 1y ago
  As an ESL person I do wish English used accents the way Spanish does to indicate what syllable has the primary emphasis.
• serial_dev 1y ago
  I also wouldn’t go as far as saying that it’s a shame that English does not use diacritics, on the other hand, I also wouldn’t say that diacritics make a language more difficult. Learning how to use them in Spanish and German takes about an afternoon, and when it comes to learning languages, that’s a negligible amount of time.
  • wink 1y ago
    Not exactly sure what you mean (in German) but just learning about them and using them correctly are 2 completely different things. I mean, you could maybe ignore the use of going a -> ä for plural forms, I would argue that learning all these words are part of it. I'm not saying it's hugely complicated but I've seen enough people struggle with it.
• W3zzy 1y ago
  I have French as second and English as my third language. English comes easy and natural because we're saturated by the language. That's one of the reasons my children don't mispronounce English words as often as they do French words. Both languages are equally terrible. On the other hand a few weeks ago my daughter demonstrated a nearly perfect pronunciation of Italian while reading a text without understanding a word. Looks like the Italians got their shit straight. Apart from pistacchio. Nobody pronounces it pistacchio...
  • trueismywork 1y ago
    Pronunciation to be honest is the least important thing in languages today. Being able to type within mobile and keyboardd is probably the most important.