English Really Needs Accent Marks
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 มิ.ย. 2024
- HELP SUPPORT NAME EXPLAIN ON PATREON: / nameexplain
TIKTOK: / nameexplain
INSTAGRAM: / nameexplainyt
FACEBOOK: / 248812236869988
TWITTER: / nameexplainyt
BOOK: bit.ly/originofnames
MERCH: teespring.com/stores/name-exp...
Do you think English should have accent marks/diacritics?
Will come out handy in the long run, but might be difficult too implement
Tbh even in Russian we don't always use accent marks. Maybe English should use it for like specifically grammar and history papers, but otherwise probably not.
Yes, if only for the fact that I absolutely love accent marks
No... we don't need silly dots over our letters that could roll off and cause unnecessary punctuation...
They could help with vowel length distinctions and make them clearer? Ie) Bass vs Bāss, Read vs Rēad as shown in the video.
I never thought about how complex the English language was until I had children. Helping them learn to read has been a eye opener. The good thing is that kids are very flexible and pick things up a lot quicker than adults.
Children can be taught how to read and play musical instruments at age four or five. But they need naps and fruit breaks to stay motivated.
English has, depending on ones dialect, fifteen to twenty different vowel sounds, with only five vowel letters. English is a mess
That's actually a misconception. Kid brains aren't more flexible than adults'. It's simply that kids have way more time to learn and way less responsibilities to think about. A rich pampered adult will learn faster than a poor working kid.
Learning another language gives you that too. I knew little to none about English until I satrted learning German.
@@kayleighlehrman9566 we used to have æ and œ for these things which made em a bit better but still
How many accent do you want?
Vietnamese language: Yes
How does Tinh spell Dun in the Vietnamese language? That's what I don't understand.
As a Vietnamese my self i can can confirm this is true.
And before you ask , yes it is a pain in the ass to type in Accent marks
@@riverrain3568 How would Vietnamese sound if you omitted all the accent marks and read it with the plain versions of the letters? Would it still be understandable to you?
@@carultch No , removing Accent marks will cause a confusion between identical words due them having completely different pronunciation
Example:
Cũng & Cùng are 2 identical words with completely different definitions and pronunciation
it would be better to call these marks : á à ả ạ ã as tone mark rather than accent mark like ă â ê ư ô ơ
As an ESL teacher in Japan, I have mixed feelings about the crazy mess of English spelling and pronunciation. One the one hand, it makes teaching English a lot more difficult. On the other hand, this very difficulty keeps me employed. :)
The whole reason my native language Czech got diacritics for letters like "čšřťďň" etc. was cause writer Jan Hus had a similar problem with the language and wanted to solve it, this however was not solved for a similar slavic language like Polish so they still use only standard letters for the accent like "cz" or "sz".
In polish we also have diacritics for the palatalized sounds ś ć ź ń (czech ň) and for distinguishing sounds of l/ł (both of which were lost in czech) also for ż (czech ž) and for some vowels ą ę ó (czech ů); for reprints of some older texts (especialy poetry) we also use é and rarely á (cognates with czech é and á)
@@jobda1211 Interesting, I surely didn't wanna sound like I say that there are no diacritics in Polish, I just wanted to say how it was with those in Czech and didn't really know much besides that, they really only told us that in Polish it's still done with the "z" after the letter, thank you for explaining it further.
*That* Jan Hus?
@@FF-pi9fq Yes, Jan Hus, he was burned as heretic in 1415, I think that's why catholic Poles were so slow with accepting of his invention and they still used digrahps and still use some of them even today. 🙂
@@FF-pi9fq Yes
The other problem was that English spelling was standardized in the 1600’s, well before pronunciation settled down. Plus, a good many words from foreign languages are used, without the spelling being changed, but using the foreign pronunciation (mostly).
I know some French, but to this day, I still can't spell "hor d'oeuvres" without looking up the spelling! 🤣
@@Maki-00 The fun thing in Texas is knowing which Spanish place names are mispronounced, and how. Bexar is pronounced more like Bear. Llano is Lahno, not Yahno, and so forth.
@@tomhalla426 Ha ha! I know Spanish too and I was always wondering if they pronounced those Spanish-named cities like they do in Spanish or if they Americanized them. Back to French, for years I knew the city, Coeur d’Alene in Idaho and I just said it to myself as it would be pronounced in French. I finally heard someone on the news say “Cordalane” and I was like, “Oh! That’s how they pronounce it!”
@@Maki-00 It is fairly random. Some places, like San Antonio, are fairly close to a Spanish pronunciation. Others, like San Jacinto, are not.
*but trying to use the foreign prinunciation and failing miserably at it
As a German I do not consider an umlaut a letter with a diacritic but a separate letter. As far as I was taught they are actually ligatures of aou and e with the dots what is left of the e (though that might be wrong), like - depending on the word - ß (called sharp s or sz) is a ligature of the long s (ſ) and short s (s) or the long s and z.
Fun fact: if you do not have umlauts you actually write ae, oe and ue. ß would be replaced by ss or - if ambiguity is to be avoided - sz (example: in Maßen (in moderation) and in Massen (in masses) here Maszen could be used to avoid ambiguity) - please never replace it by B! There is a huge difference between Scheibe (slice, pane (of Glas)) and Scheiße (shit) ;)
Jes, æz yn Iŋglyš speliŋ riformŗ, Aj kyncydŗ ledŗz vyð dajykrydyks tw bi sepryt ledŗz.
Ðer yz o dyfrync bytvin "blŗ" (blur) end "bļr" (bowler)!
Asov jw ar rajt, ðo wmlævc dw kom from ðo ledŗ E.
(Yes as an English spelling reformer, I consider letters with diacritics to be separate letters.
There is a difference between "blŗ" (blur) and "bļr" (bowler)!
Also you are right, the umlauts do come from the letter E.)
And now I looked it up in the German Wikipedia for those wondering: the dots of the umlauts ARE what is left of an e above the letters aou.
„Die deutschen Umlautpunkte (allgemeiner auch Umlautzeichen genannt) entstanden aus einem über a, o oder u geschriebenen kleinen e […] Ein Trema hat dieselbe Gestalt wie Umlautpunkte, aber eine andere Funktion.“ (The German umlaut dots (commonly known as umlaut marks) originated from a small e written above a, o or u. […] A trema has the same appearance as umlaut dots but it’s function is different.)
fancy engraved inscriptions still employ a small e or E inserted into the other vowel. we had one of those in the local church when i grew up.
there is an argument to be made that they are letter variants in German though, since they grammatically derive from there non-umlauted counterparts _and_ are collated in the dictionary
as a swede, ÅÄÖ are all fully separate letters just like A and O are.
@@fariesz6786 they are put together in dictionaries because they actually are ligatures. As they represent ae, oe and ue respectively it makes total sense to put them in this place in the dictionary. They are not however accented letters though.
I think the origin of the umlauts - and in fact ß - is so far removed from us today, that we for all intends and purposes see them as separate letters although they actually are ligatures of two letters representing a slightly different sound?
I don’t think many Germans know about the origins of ß as two separate ligatures that merged (which is why we call it either sz or sharp s - those were different ligatures originally which looked quite similar though. rewboss has a nice video on that.)
As a non-native english speaker, I can assure you that english is actually pretty easy. Weird? Yes. Irregular? Very much so. Hard? Nope.
I agree. I've learnt Russian as a second language (intermediate) and I'll be doing Mandarin next; Russian grammar and tenses are a million times more difficult than English, but pronunciation and technicality is much better and more practical. Each language has their own interesting perks.
a thing which ends up being one of the biggest advantages english has over other languages is that, due to how there is so much content you can consume in english due to the sheer popularity of the language -(and how maybe there are things that you like but havent been translated yet so you end up having to learn how to understand english)- , it ends up being kinda easy to just jump into learning it casually just by watching stuff and end up picking up on the dumb stuff this language has. saying this as also a non-native english speaker.
Interestingly, English is a lot less irregular than it often seems. Most of the time it's less irregular and more complicated + badly explained (it's astonishing how much more sense it makes if you just Mark The Stress Pattern! Which, of course, no one does. naturally). ... of course, most is not all, and some of the actual irregularities exist for really, REALLY dumb reasons
I before E,
Except after C,
Or when sounded as A,
As in neighbor and weigh.
Or in ageist and science,
Where the syllables are split.
English is weird,
So get used to it.
Depends entirely on what language you're coming from. If you're a French or German speaker, for example, yes, English is relatively easy to learn. When I studied Japanese in school, however, I assure you that our Japanese exchanges struggled WAY more with it. Any language is going to be easier or harder to learn depending on how similar it is to your native language.
There's a quote that goes around in programming, and I think it applies perfectly to spoken languages too:
_"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."_
- Bjarne Stroustrup
In Spanish, accented vowels (á, é, í, ó, ú) are used to show that that syllable is stressed, and can be the difference between continuo, continúo, continuó (continuous, I continue, he/she/it continued, respectively). Or to differenciate monosyllabic words with the same spelling from one another, such as tú (singular informal you) from tu (your), or de (of) from dé (to give).
Meanwhile ü is only used when it goes between g and either e or i to show that it has to be pronounced, like you know you pronounce the u in "pingüino", but you don't in "Rodríguez"
Do you guys pronounce Ó as Ô? In portuguese Ó is open while Ô is closed
@@pedrosabino8751 No, we don't have different sounds for o and ó.
Spanish has a very standard, run-of-the-mill 5-vowel system. 3 open vowels (a, e, i) and 2 rounded ones (o, u)
The accent only indicates stress, not a change in sound.
@@CGaboL Interesting, in portuguese are the 2, as in the word Vômito, it indicates the stressed syllable and the pronounce
Does y ever have an accent?
@@Ggdivhjkjl No, it doesn't.
Y is considered a consonant and accents only go on vowels. Ñ is not an accented n, it's its own letter, btw.
The diaeresis is also used for words like "naïve" (which also has the I pronounced separately, it's not pronounced "knave")
But even in that case (a particulary accurate faithful French word appropriation) that accent is not used the vast majority of the time in writing nor would it normally even be remarked on during a spelling test. In a way, because of how we have to learn the language with such chaotic unclear rules accents are simply viewed as unimportant even when they nominally should be there. After all... its not like I'd ever think of pronouncing naive any other way (like our other words). It effectively makes the idea of an accent mark redundant because of their non-mainstreamness. In fact, its telling that as a Uni student who also did English Language A-level, I don't even know how to add accents to words even if I wanted to in the case of something like naive (on pc anyway) and the lack of such options on an English keyboard.
It is, but how many such words are there? Naïve, Noël, Brontë - and what else. Even then they are just as often omitted as included. They slipped into written English through the back door and I sincerely wish they would slip back out again (except of course in the names of heavy metal bands where they are compulsory).
The same goes for café, façade, and such like. Zero added-value spelling errors. Get rid.
this is the usage he described in the video, yeah. weird he didn't mention this specific word since it's probably the most common word that uses the diaeresis
Also "daïs" is quite common, and sometimes the diaeresis is used in "coördinate" instead of a hyphen.
Isn't that a French word?
One thing I would like to mention is that in Spanish diacritics don't actually affect the sound a particular vowel makes, rather they affect which syllable in a word is emphasized.
And the voice of u in pingüino, vergüenza.
They tell you the STRESS of a word, or they tell you the conjugation.
The only one that affects its sound would be "ü", it just sounds like a regular U but it does make "Pingüino" and "Pinguino" sound different
If English was written with accents, I feel like the sudden realization of the ungodly amount of dialects English actually has would probably make a few dictionary writers break down and cry.
Yeah English is kind of like Chinese at this point where you have different dialects/languages (Mandarin and Cantonese) using the same writing system, but are read completely differently by said dialect/language. Adding accent marks would break down communication between the various dialects.
@@greasher926different varieties of English are far more mutually intelligible than different Chinese languages
This isn't an exclusivity of English. Spanish speakers are completely different accents and different dialects, and they are able to write using the same accent marks.
As much as I'd hate to admit it, any attempts to reform English now is nigh impossible. However, if any spelling reforms would be made, I would have a few ideas.
1. The accent mark would be consistently used EVERY TIME final "-e's" are pronounced, like in resumé, café, and Pokémon.
2. Have distinct accent marks for the different vowel phonemes that are spelled with the same vowel letter, like in Vietnamese, i.e. "pho", "phô", and "phơ" are all pronounced noticeably different.
Also worth mentioning is that if if English does adopt accent marks for typing on computers, it should use IME's for typing like in Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese, rather than the stupidly complicated accent inputs for Spanish and French.
Vaj kent vi ǯost hæƀ von ledŗ fur von sævnd?
(Why can't we just have one letter for one sound?)
@@servantofaeie1569 I don't want to learn new letters.
I normally use é to indicate a non-silent final E (e.g. I always write "café" with the accent, I call the work experience document a "CV" so that avoids the resume/resumé problem) when it's not clear. Funny enough, I haven't seen anyone write "animé" (I know there was no accent there in Japanese, but final E is never silent there so they don't need to specify that)
@@Razor-gx2dq Well 26 isnt enough so toughen up if you want to get rid of this outdated inconsistant spelling system
I think people get that Æ and Ø look like their own letters and not accented letters. The Swedish versions however; Ä and Ö, look very much like accented letters, even though they are their own letters.
german äöü too, all of them are just contractions of ae oe, just one of them with e written inside of them and one on top of them and then simplified, so they are all equivalent
@@fywus_3299 Well, yes and no. If you look in german dictionaries, everything that starts with Ä is in the A section, everything that starts with Ö is in the O section, and everything that starts with Ü is in the U section. However, in Swedish, they are completely separate letters at the end of the alphabet, so you find Å, Ä and Ö after Z in a Swedish dictionary. Your claim is true, but it isn't the same as how they work in Swedish.
@@SuperAronGamerMNO There are several rules in German, Ä can be treated like A (most dictionaries), like Ae (lists of names) or as a separate letter that comes after Azzzz in alphabetical order. According to Wikipedia, in Austrian telephone books the latter applies.
@@sheaulle Thanks. I didn't know that.
@@SuperAronGamerMNO I didn't really know until I looked it up today, it was more a feeling of having encountered different rules in the past
This is why I like japanese. They just beat a word into submission until it fits their pronunciation.
Example: アイスクリーム|Aisukurimu - Ice cream
Wish we would do this with Portuguese, but Portuguese speakers are extremely against adapting foreign words into Portuguese
So we're forced to write and pronounce "lingerie" and "feedback" the "correct" way even though it confuses people who are learning the language
@@graffiti9145 caubói, leiaute, nocaute
@@allejandrodavid5222 these are older words, nowadays people use the English spelling
@@graffiti9145 apenas em palavras mais novas mesmo; não sei se vão aportuguesar, seria interessante, japonês adapta, por exemplo. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@graffiti9145 1 year later but in Spanish we do that just people see it written as it sounds and go bananas for no reason.
Actually, ancient Latin did have diacritics called Apices (the same as a macron in modern Latin convention), which indicated a long vowel. They looked like Á, É, I, Ó, Ú instead of the modern Ā, Ē, Ī, Ō, Ū. The letter "I" did not have an apex and instead was instead written taller.
They were not used all the time, but they were quite common, with many examples of classical writing having it. They are often not noticed because they are very thin and look like scratches on the ancient inscriptions and written documents.
Funny enough when writing old English modern linguists use the apices/macrons to show long vowels
@@swagmund_freud6669 it has become a fairly common way to represent vowel length. You can even see it in Maori
oh funny seeing you here bro
Do we know why “I” used a different height instead of using an apex?
two things i'd like to point out:
Latin _did_ make use of diacritics. however, some we don't understand as diacritics anymore - namely the hook that differentiates C and G (to some degree also i and j but that is a pretty late invention and way less straight-forward)
and others, the apices, we don't see bc they have often withered away. see Luke Ranieri's (polyMathy) videos for that. one can still see the elongated I (for the long vowel i) in the manuscript you showed though.
as for English spelling, yes, it is a pain in the cloaca, but English speakers themselves seem to be much more intimidated by their own spelling than us L2 speakers (on average of course) - we usually just adapt, learn that we have misspronounced a word (or just stubbornly continue to misspronounce it) and move on. again, not saying that English spelling is easy or makes an awful lot of sense, but it's not as big of a deal as many think.
The apex, which marks long vowels, is today replaced with the macron, but many texts and scientific names are written without them, which leaves me wondering which syllable is stressed in e.g. Maratus (peacock spiders, in the jumping spider family). -atus is -ātus (thus stressed on 'ā') if it's a past participle of a verb in -āre, but there does not appear to be a verb "marāre", so "Maratus" is probably derived from something else.
Some accents like macrons were used to mark long vowels in Latin, so the video didn't get that totally correct.
As far as I know when Latin took the Greek, they didn't have a G sound, but C (pronounced like K) sounded close enough to them and later when they did get a G sound, they just took their C and stuck a little Greek G to it.
Here's polyMath video on Latin macron: th-cam.com/video/D3bmLi1bKI0/w-d-xo.html
Salve, amici!
In rare cases, the English past tense suffix "-ed" can take a grave accent. This mark doesn't change the meaning of the word; it is only used when an author wants readers to say a past tense word with an extra syllable, usually to improve the rhythm of a phrase.
For example, "winged" has one syllable, while "wingèd" has two (WING-id). If you were writing a poem about a bird, you might think "The wingèd creature flies" has a more pleasant-sounding flow than "The winged creature flies", and so you could include the grave accent to convey your preferred pronunciation.
This is also used for when past tense verbs and adjectives are written but not pronounced the same, like < learned (past tense of learn)> and < learnèd (someone well-educated)>.
Then write it as Wing'ed. It's easier for the eye to recognise two separate syllables. It's quite common in poetry; like Ev'ryday instead of Everyday so it becomes two syllables instead of the regular three.
@@yahyazekeriyya2560 (ESL here) is it e'ery? really?? i thought (by only reading the contraction that is indeed presented in various lyrics/poems as ev'ry instead of e'ery and paying attention to how native english speakers say the word very quickly) that you were supposed to pronounce it "evry" (kind of like the word "every" actually sounds too... you don't actually say e.ve.ry do you?? as far as i know every is two syllables anyhow, and i was under the impression the contraction meant you would drop the extra "e" sound when you pronounce the "v" to say the word quicker).
couldn't it be an accent (as in regional difference) thing? because it's really always been written as "ev'ry" as far as i can remember.
Kind of like the word “blessed” which is often pronounced either “blest” or “bless-id”.
How about we make a better solution. 'd, 't (for used and any D -> T in words ), -ed. I don't consider this a challenge.
The silent GH in many English words is something I recently realized is a leftover from German. I think most of these words still exist in modern German, where they are spelled with CH. Which represents a sound (actually two sounds) that no longer exist in English.
Durch (through), Nacht (night), Knecht (knight), Flucht (flight), Bucht (bight), Macht (might), Licht (light), Recht (right), hoch (high), fechten (fight). The meanings of some have somewhat changed over a thousand years, but still apply to closely related concepts.
"Plight" has the same origin as Pflicht, which in modern German is "duty".
"Blight" is related to blass (pale), where the CH no longer exists in the German word.
"Bright" is the only one I can't think of that no longer has a related word in German.
Brecht is a German name related to bright
Deutsch can make three sounds written as ch, actually: [x] (acht), [χ] (schwach), and [ç] (jährlich).
Go to many parts of Scotland and you’ll hear ‘night’ pronounced exactly as written!
It was shocking to me when you said english is notoriously hard to learn. I am a second language english speaker and i always thought the exact opposite about it. Yeah you have to separately learn pronuntiation and spelling but that is a small price to pay for not having gender and barely any inflection. I would say its an especially easy language to learn
Same here. I don't think he knows other languages that well
I've lived in Vietnam for 5 years and the diacritics really make sense, especially when the language doesn't. You can even act them out with your hand and help you to pronounce and differentiate the vocab.There are 6 ones and without them the word is spelt exactly the same and have 6 completely different meanings. Saying that, I'm still utterly shit at it.
Doesn’t Vietnamese have 12 vowels (including some differentiated with diacritics) and six tones (also written with diacritics)?
@@wilh3lmmusic yeah the vowels are mental. I don't know the exact number of variables but it's huge
The German "Umlauts" are considered letters on their own just like the Scandinavian "æ" and "ø" are.
Yeah ,Those English speakers, doesn't understand
nglish has the second highest rate of native dislexia among europian language (second only to french). This is because the spoken language and the written language are 2 sperate languages that have nothing to do with each other. Let me show you by phonetically writing down these sentences in spoken english.
Ingliš haz de sekend hāiest reit ov neitiv dislexia amang juropīen languidžes (sekond ounlī tu frenč). Dis iz bekaz de spouken languidž and de languidž ār 2 sepret languidžes dat hēv nofing tu dū wif īč ader. Let mī šow jū bāi raitting dawn dīz dentencez in spouken ingliš.
Ingliš džast nīds raiting reform. It iz anakseptable dat de spouken and ritten languidžes ār 2 different languidžes. Its 100% possibl tu pull off.
@@kungszigfrids1482 excepts Englishs speakerss woulds needs tos writes accordings tos ones standardiseds accents. Theres iss nos ways Is woulds writes Englishs ins as midwests yanks accents.
The c's! The fact that "Pacific Ocean" has 3 different c sounds and you only know which ones to use based on experience is insane. I didn't realize how bizarre this was until I lived in Czechia where they use special accent marks on their c's and other consonants.
It's the same in Spanish, except we only have two sounds for "C" and it is a well established rule. C can only sound like an "S" if its placed directly before a weak vowel
The Pacific ocean is technically sea
The origin of some of the diacritics you discussed goes down to transcription during the middle ages. Before the printing press was invented, books were handwritten. Also paper wasn't invented yet, so parchment was used. Parchment was very expensive so to press costs transcribers would try to get as much text on as little paper as possible. Therefore they would try to decrease the amount of letters they would actually have to write out by writing some letters as diacritics over other letters. For instance:
1) ~ is an abstracted form of 'n'. You can actually recognize it still: the wavy form corresponds to the zigzag in the capital letter N. So this meant that the sound it was written on top of would be followed by an 'n'. This way 'õ' would correspond to 'on' and so on.
In French and Portuguese vowels that were followed by nasal sounds were nasalized. In Portuguese the tilde is still used to indicate nasalization of a and o (for instance in 'são', 'saint', which comes from 'sanctus'), but not always and never above e, i or u. A regular nasal can also indicate nasal vowels, such as in french (where ~ is never used).
You could also write it over consonants of course, but a cluster of a consonant followed by a nasal is very rare. In Latin a cluster with a nasal as the end part would mostly just be two nasal sounds or two n's to be more specific. So the letter n with a tilde, ñ, was the only common consonant with a tilde and basically the only one that stuck around. At the same time the sound of the double 'n' - which was originally actually pronounced longer than a single 'n' - changed to a palatal articulation, which means it was pronounced by bringing the back your tongue to your hard palate as with the letter 'y' in the word 'you'. this explains why 'ñ' sounds like 'ny'. This explains the evolution from Latin annus to Spanish año (both 'year').
2) ^ is an abstracted form of 's'. The cursive 's' also resembles this shape, with the last stroke sloping down usually looping back somewhat in cursive. This diacritic occurs most in French and you can see it in the words 'vêtements' and 'hôte'. These two words are derived from 'vestimentum' and 'hospis' respectively. French eventually stopped pronouncing the 's' when it preceded another consonant, but the 's' still changed the specific quality of the preceding vowel, which is why it indicates a specific pronunciation of vowels.
3) The ´ basically always indicates that a vowel is lengthened. It is used as such in Irish spelling. I don't know specifically about how it came to be in French as it is used now, but it probably also originally indicated length. Later on the sound of the long vowel changed and the length distinction disappeared, leaving only a difference in vowel quality, indicated by an accent.
In many languages, such as Spanish, ´ just indicates stress.
4) I don't know the origin of ¨ in German and other languages, i.e. it doesn't seem to be derived from any specific letter which was then abstracted, such as was the case for ^ and ~ . It resembles the dot on the letter 'i' (which itself was only invented to make the 'i' more recognizable in between all the other vertical strokes in the Latin alphabet) so perhaps that's where it comes from.
¨ normally indicates palatalization of the vowel on top of which it is written. Basically this means that you pronounce the vowel with the back of your tongue raised to your hard palate to sound more like 'y' as in 'you' or like 'ee' as in 'see' (this is similar to what happened with ñ): an 'oo' (as in cool) sound becomes more like 'ee' (as in beet), and 'oh'-sound (as in doe) becomes more like 'ey' (as in hay), an ah-sound (as in father) becomes more like and 'eh'-sound (as in bed) and so on. The resulting sound lands somewhere in between the two: palatalised 'oo' is actually rounded 'ee' and so on.
Nasalization, nasal clusters resolving into new sounds and systematic loss of 's' in some positions never really happened in English. There was some palatalization of vowels, but it wasn't as extensive and hasn't been retained as much as in for instance German. The length of vowels was written in different ways. We can for instance simply inferring length from whether a syllable is written open or closed: the reason we know the 'o' in open is long is because there is only one consonant following it, which itself is immediately followed by a vowel within the word itself. The 'o' in oppen would be short because there are two p's immediately following it. The 'o' in 'op' is also short because the syllable ends on a 'p'. Otherwise vowel length is indicated by doubling vowels, such as in 'boot' or digraphs as in 'toe'.
There's no way to systematically add diacritics to English that would make much etymological or historical sense. If you would do it and would try to keep it systematic, you would quickly end up with a written language that is unrecognizable from what we have now.
Accent marks make a lot of difference when you have words that are spelled similarly but pronounced differently (like read and read)
In Portuguese we have the words Sábia (that means a wise woman), Sabia (that means 'knew') and Sabiá (which is a species of bird)
Or Avô and Avó which is Grandfather and Grandmother respectively
Sim.. e porque ou porquê
@@Iberian_maps HOMÓFONAS HOMÓGRAFAS
@@Iberian_maps porque, porquê, por que e por quê são pronunciados exatamente igual em Português brasileiro. Se em Portugal são pronunciados diferente, sorte a de vocês, porque pra nós foi um saco aprender isso na escola kkkk
@@davigurgel2040 completamente diferentes... talvez na imposição do português aos nativos, isso se perdeu. ;)
@@davigurgel2040 a posição da sílaba tónica muda entre porque/por que e porquê/por quê
The only diacritics in the Spanish language are and the is a distinct letter, which started to be used by scribes in medieval times in order to quickly write NN in manuscripts by putting an N on top of another.
Interestingly enough there are words in Spanish with NN like innovación. These are new words adopted from another language.
@ Or "cúbrannos", which is a verb meaning "cover" with the pronoun "us" attached.
Do you guys don't use ^?
@@pierreabbat6157 yes, indeed. Those words are natural to the language.
@@pedrosabino8751No, perhaps you are thinking of french, portuguese or other related languages.
The Dutch umlaut you mentioned ( called 'trema' in dutch) is actually a diaeresis, same as in English.
As Jules once sang, "English spelling reforms break more than they can fix."
though I'd normally agree, I sorta think diacritics would help, especially as a learning/reading aid
@@lekoicy maybe something like annotated english
@@rextanglr4056 yeah that's probably the best
Verne?
FYI, German umlauts are not considered accents but their own letters, e. g. similar to what you said about “Å”.
In the case of Umlauts, their source is also clear: they're a ligature with the letter e. In this sense e. g. Ä is very similar to Æ.
Look up how (lowercase) e looks in old "Kurrent" font handwriting, basically just two vertical lines next to each other, and Umlauts are commonly still two vertical lines (instead of two dots) in handwriting today. Note that Umlauts have a different origin than diaeresis, which IS an accent, and (perhaps unfortunately) uses the same character on computers, even though it's always two dots. (Never two vertical dashes.)
"FYI, German umlauts are not considered accents but their own letters, e. g. similar to what you said about “Å”."
Similar in Polish, our ą, ę, ł, ż, ó (and more) are completely separate than a, e, l, z, o
"ą" is pronounced closer to Polish "om" than Polish "a".
"ł" is essentially what would be written in English as "w"
"ó" is pronounced exactly the same as Polish "u" and is kept nowadays mainly for grammatical reasons, as it points out which form to use in conjugations.
All of them are considered separate letters in Polish variant of the Latin alphabet.
@@vladprus4019 I'm not sure now what makes a diacritic a diacritic, but as far as I know these Polish letters has never been ligatures. The accent in ó used to indicate long vowel (a vowel that you pronounce longer than normal one) and we had also é at time but it bacame one with normal e and ó changed into /u/ instead of /o/. So it is not like the line is some other letter written over it or something. I am not sure about the history of other letters but I dont think those are letters incorporated into another letter
Also ł sounds like English w but it used to sounds similar to dark l eg in British ball, that's why it's based on l
Over here in Hungary we use < o >, < ó >, < ö >, and < ő > all separately.
After looking some terms up, I'm not sure if - technically - I'm using the term “ligature” incorrectly, as a ligature probably implies that some things are actually connected. On the other hand, even some letters are not connected, like “i”. The dots/dashes of ä, ö, ü are part of the letter just as much as the dot on i is part of the letter (and it doesn't need to have a dot, e. g. Turkish makes a distinction between i / İ with dot and ı / I without), and the origin of ä is SIMILAR to the origin of the actual ligature æ, so the comparison is IMO appropriate.
Yet Germans treat them as the same letters, Brüder becomes Bruder in writing for many.
Actually, in many ancient inscriptions diacritics (acute accent and macron) are used in Latin as pronunciation guidance. They were never a part of correct spelling, but they were sometimes used to aid the reader. They're just often hard to see because they were written really thin.
As a native portuguese speaker, I can say learning the english language, while full of weirdness and exceptions, doesn't feel particularly hard. In portuguese, however, accents can help in pronunciation, but it's a real pain when writing to know where they should or shouldn't go.
Something else that makes english easier to learn is the reduced amout of verb conjugations. I also learned spanish and french, and memorizing all of those conjugations was by far the hardest part.
I think it's only hard if you don't know how the word is supposed to be pronunced since the rules are based on pronunciation. The actual hard thing about Portuguese spelling is knowing when to use s=z, c=s, ch=x, ç=ss. We have no rules for those, they sound the same and you just need to memorise them.
Lá vem 🙄
@cferracini no, it's not only the pronunciation, there are a bunch of different rules, for example, the word "secretaria" has emphasis in the "i" but has no accent, meanwhile the word "secretária" has emphasis in the "a" but does have an diacritic sign.
I’m a native English speaker trying to learn Portuguese, sadly I still get accent marks confused :(
Given how badly many English-speakers already somehow manage to mangle writing in their own language, diacritics would just be another thing to screw up.
@MI6 this is not being context based imo, it’s just similar spellings of terms that are tangentially related (like here possessives vs contractions of “to be”). Some things in english are context based, like the two read’s and other homonyms, homophones, and friends, but that goes for any language. I would say that only cultures apply any meaningful distinction between context, like Japanese or Korean cultures being high-context compared to most english and in general germanic cultures being relatively low-context, since then the depth of subtext changes instead of context just representing the existence of ineffective alphabets or poor word-making.
@@Quayledant it's easy because you know what they mean. They are and they're who carez
English has the second highest rate of native dislexia among europian language (second only to french). This is because the spoken language and the written language are 2 sperate languages that have nothing to do with each other. Let me show you by phonetically writing down these sentences in spoken english.
Ingliš haz de sekend hāiest reit ov neitiv dislexia amang juropīen languidžes (sekond ounlī tu frenč). Dis iz bekaz de spouken languidž and de languidž ār 2 sepret languidžes dat hēv nofing tu dū wif īč ader. Let mī šow jū bāi raitting dawn dīz dentencez in spouken ingliš.
Ingliš džast nīds raiting reform. It iz anakseptable dat de spouken and ritten languidžes ār 2 different languidžes. Its 100% possibl tu pull off.
@@kungszigfrids1482 Your phonetic transcription was really hard to read as a Scottish-accented speaker. This is why it will never be possible.
Yər fonetɪc transcrɪpshən wɔs rili hard t rid az a Scotɪsh-acsentəd spikər. Thɪs ɪz waï it wʌl nevər bi posibəl.
(correction because I'm not good at IPA)
Admittedly, the traditional American reaction to diacretical marks is to instantly give up.
"Cedilla" means "little Z" in Spanish. It is used in Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, and French, but not in the language whence the word came. Then again, "WC" (water closet) is used in many languages, but not so much in English.
Cedilla were used in Spanish but fell out
@ilikeminecraft6753 I think "ceda" was an old form of the word "ceta" / "zeta" and that's where "cedilla" came from, since it refers to it originally looking like a tiny letter Z.
It used to refer to the sound of close to the Russian "cz" iirc
we use cedilla a LOT in portuguese
@@felipook9 The best parts of Portuguese are those things that Spanish lacks-- e.g. tildes on vowels. The circumflex accent is fun, too, but I can never remember if it's used in Portugal or Brazil.
I have always used diacritics to mark emphasis in English, as we do in Dutch, like this:
"- Would you like your coffee with or without sugar?
- Wíth, please."
or
"Rhinoshield is thé best phone case brand on the market."
They say you should be the change you want to see in the world.
Lol
i still read it the same. you failed
English was just standardized based on the personal preferences of some Belgiaboo London printer, rather than being systematically standardized or restandardized like many other languages? That explains a lot
I'll say this: not having them makes English a lot easier to type
When you get used to it, it really is not. Especially with keyboards designed to.
i mean you get used to it.
not really, you just press a single key for an accent
@@eduardoxenofonte4004 where tho
@@TinNguyen-rl2xr just make a new keyboard lol, it's not that hard
As a spanish native speaker It wouldve been waayyy too helpful while studying the language
Would have it though? itd be actually really just complicate things if you think about it.
@@shrekeyes2410 How? Other than studying IPA and memorizing the pronunciation of words, there’s no way to differentiate things. Using diacritics, you’d have a more efficient way to differentiate things, because the diacritics could be assigned to specific sounds and uniformize the language. I don’t see myself speaking Portuguese without accents. Not only for the different stress of some words but because they also have different sounds. An “á” sounds different from an “â”, which is kind of like an “uh”.
@@shutapp9958 In my personal experience, as Native Spanish speaker, yeah, Spanish needs it, but when you're talking, do you really see the accent? It's mostly the intonation and context, that's why there are homophones and you'd understand which one is used by context, English is more minimalistic than Spanish and I see it as more efficient, adding the marks would take part of it away, I don't think it needs it, not for anything no one has much problem learning it, actually Spanish with his pretty specific rules in my opinion, is even more messy, at least speaking wise, while perhaps English has way too many sounds, Spanish lacks them, most Spanish speakers don't differentiate "s" "c" and "z"(z and c always share one sound) y and ll are pronounced the same by like 95% of Spanish speakers, v and b more of the same, and trust me having a clear difference would help it a lot, while you know just by looking at a word in Spanish how it's pronounced, to my personal liking it'd be better if I didn't see "baya" and "valla" with the same exact pronunciation.
@@shutapp9958 it wouldn’t work because vowels and consonants aren’t pronounced consistently enough to create standard accents.
@@juanmanuelmoramontes3883
Spanish has very few sounds compared to other languages tho, and those exceptions "c, g, ll, ch, etc." have well established rules, unlike English, with words like "Tear and Tear" being pronounced differently for no reason.
I'm a trilingual who's pretty much very fluent in English both in writing or verbally. I still, to this day, complain non stop about how learning how words are supposed to be pronounced was extremely annoying. Actually, to be completely honest, it still is.
If anyone wants to get a glimpse of how it feels to learn how to speak English, check out Gerard Nolst Trenité's poem "The Chaos". Read it and try to imagine how it would feel to read that poem without prior knowledge of how the words are supposed to be pronounced.
Extremely. Obnoxious.
0:56 diacritics are present in pretty much any writing system that is shared by multiple languages with different phonemic inventories, "especially in languages written in the Latin alphabet" because literally every Language can be written with Latin letters. There are even set diacritics to convey set sounds/modifications to sounds, and this is what the International Phonetic Alphabet is.
1:19 this is really the job of letters more broadly (not just diacritics), diacritics are just an element of what makes a letter/other orthographic symbol. they can either be quick and easy ways to have more entirely separate letters in a language's alphabet (i.e. german/swedish ä, and the scandinavian å are just the symbol with a diacritic to make it a separate letter that was thought to be in some way similar at the time of invention; at 2:15 it seems like he thinks that spanish ñ is an exception when it's really the rule), or it can mark how a word is pronounced (i.e. italian uses acute accents primarily to mark stress on words with an irregular stress pattern), or im sure there are other ways that diacritics have been used
2:30 - 3:36 the problem of "english doesn't use accents" is really just down to different languages having different orthographic solutions to different phonetic problems. like dutch opts for writing a vowel twice instead of a macron for a long/short vowel distinction. the countries of europe are all close and influence each other, so diacritics are just a european orthographic tradition; it's weird to suggest that language subfamilies might not use diacritics to begin with because there's really nothing intrinsic to any language that might make them favour/disfavour diacritics (although obviously a language with only 5 or fewer distinct vowels will not need diacritics, a language with 20 distinct vowels could either use a few symbols and diacritics or 20 separate symbols; both essentially achieve the same thing).
3:37 å definitely has a diacritic, and all 3 are ligatures (combinations of two letters) -> ; -> ; -> , and the double-dot umlaut is just a simplification for 'e' over the top of letters, so I don't see why these 3 letters have to be distinctly said to not have diacritics. if it's because they're "letters, not letters-with-diacritics", i've said already that glyphs with diacritics are usually considered to be separate letters in most languages anyway.
4:15 - 5:08 English spelling is consistent but only if you know a lot about the history of the language and where words come from. its spelling is "inconsistent" because our chosen codified spelling system celebrates the diverse origins of words. Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary is really the main origin for the current English spelling convention, and he aimed to represent etymology in how words are spelt. also because there's no central body controlling how words are spelt, we literally could all start spelling things however we want, but we don't, because that defies convention and wouldn't actually be helpful to anyone. English's non-phonetic spelling is a plus in another way, though, because it means that English speakers all over the world can feel represented by the way things are spelt, because it phonetically represents pretty much no one (it represents different flavours of English from 1400-1800 mostly, which is a broad time period that represents no one anymore)
5:28 - 6:13 'through' vs 'thorough' is solved by them being spelt differently, really don't see how an accent will do anything here. just learn both spellings; adding 2 one-time-use diacritics would just double the amount of things to learn here. you could also change the spelling to thru and thʌra, but this is unconventional and no one would do that. read/réad is fair; i'd also add that it would be useful to add stress accents like in italian to distinguish verbs from nouns i.e. condúct (verb) cónduct (noun), progréss/prógress (bunch more here: optimacomm.com/services/contrasting-noun-verb-stress/), but then again, we could just not do that. context is enough usually, and other languages feel no need to show tense, or even clearly distinguish verbs from nouns (there's an argument that some languages have only verbs that act like nouns sometimes), so these isolated examples will probably leave diacritics in the same place they already are: forgotten about.
10:26 - 10:48 English never used or , (though Wikipedia says that might have arisen in England, but only remained very briefly (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ø#History); I dont count that). ('ash') is a Latin letter (not a letter of "germanic root") that was used by Old English to represent a vowel halfway between /a/ and /e/, so really no creativity going on here with English like you see in most other languages. Some people will still insist on spelling it to this day, though, so it's not entirely dead.
11:10 we know why the vowel shift happened: because languages change, all the time. to greatly simplify, vowels vary a lot from language to language and dialect to dialect, but within those they are pretty consistent. a french is very different from an english one, and they really both represent arbitrary constructions of the vocal tract with a margin of error (this margin will be "stay as close to the intended vowel as possible and dont be too much like a different vowel"). you can imagine how over many, many generations vowels could shimmy away from one standard pronunciation to another, and the idea of the "ideal vowel" will just be whatever you heard around you as a baby, which will change with every generation. This leads to vowels shifting.
11:16 "changing the pronunciation and spelling..." really the reason the great vowel shift is important is because pronunciation changed but spelling DIDN'T.
12:06 im pretty sure caxton didn't add the 'flemish touches' himself; words like 'ghost' ive heard were the result of dutch printers assuming that 'gost' had a dutch 'g' and they just added it by mistake, and then it was codified so they just kept it. he also didn't 'ruin english', he just came up with a standard way to write english, but spellings were by no means set in stone yet. it wasnt until (again) johnson's dictionary that it was seen as proper to spell things consistently (shakespeare was around hundreds of years after caxton and was inconsistent in writing his own name).
overall: english doesn't use accents and is fine. if it added accents, it would increase the inconsistency of english spelling by adding more letters. english orthography only half-tries to represent its pronunciation and pretty much achieves what it sets out to achieve.
The thing is that instead of diacritics, English likes to use digraphs or letter combinations instead of modifying singular letters. There are rules to pronunciation in English that can make sense however, there are plenty of exceptions and the number of rules is vast. But generally we can see a word we have never seen before and still know how to pronounce it. I think language is push and pull. While English pronunciation can be a monster at times, many aspects of its grammar are surprisingly simpler than other languages (ignoring phrasal verbs 🤮). Simple Verb conjugation, the almost compete disappearance of the subjunctive, lack of gender, or lack of a proper future or conditional tense come to mind
Well, I think simplicity of English is overestimated. Like there is a lot of good materials and a lot of people that speak it also as L2, but the number of tenses (especially perfect ones, that are pretty hard to get one's head around), conditionals (like "if ..." sentences), definite/indefinite articles (probably most European languages have them, but many languages dont have it at all eg most Slavic languages, some have only indefinite eg Turkish, and some only definite eg Semitic languages). There are probably some other quirks that I forgot
English doesn't have grammatical gender or gendered articles which is good but it still has gendered pronouns which is another nightmare. And you've got people who are actually against the singular use of they/them/their/theirs/themselves not even acknowledging the real problem with both singular and plural 2nd person being just "you" and the singular you still grammatically being treated as plural such as getting "are". Other languages, be that German which is closely related to English or be that Turkish which has absolutely no relation of origin with it, have different ways of referring to a singular "you" depending on the authority or relationship or the type of respect between you and them (basically formal and informal).
@@HOPEfullBoi01 English used to have different forms of you. But they were dropped after the 14-1500s. They were the informal Thou/Thy/Thee for You/your/yours.
@@carissamace I know but it's still really strange to me that this language dropped this arguably important feature it had so long ago and some of its speakers now are genuinely upset about something similar starting to happen to gendered 3rd person pronouns which literally have no purpose but to push social gender roles and division.
@@HOPEfullBoi01 It has its role. Look at the sentence "Jane hit Eric because he was stupid" without gendered pronouns it's harder to distinguish who did what to whom (which is apparent in sentence "Mark hit Eric because he was stupid" you can assume both that Mark was stupid and that Eric was stupid)
I would absolutely love if English somehow introduced accents, you are absolutely right. Read/read and lead/lead often get me confused, and I have spoken English for as long as I have spoken.
English and Latin, the Dark Souls of languages. Difficult, and hold a “get good” attitude to outsiders.
Actually, English is not very hard if you compare it to other languages.
Sure, English is hard to learn for people who speak unrelated languages, but a German is going to have a much easier time learning it than someone who speaks Japanese, for example.
@@aurexify "Other languages" like non-phonetic monstrosities like Chinese, or what? I don't see how a phonetic language could be harder to learn than a semi-phonetic one like English.
Because the grammar of sone languages can be pretty complicated. English doesn't require you to think about the gender of objects, the tone of the sentence, the nouns' functions in the sentence, or (for the most part) the subject doing the action of a verb.
@@chad_bro_chill Just out of curiosity, what do you mean when you say Chinese is a 'non-phonetic monstrosity'? Is it because its writing system is logographic? I don't think I've heard anything about Pinyin or the romanisation system being non-phonetic either so I'm just a little confused.
A few funny observations about Portuguese and diacritics:
"accents" (:acentos") is used to refer to a subgroup of diacritic marks, which affect vowels and always make that syllable the stressed on in the word.
Modern Portuguese uses "é" with the sound French "è" would have, while "ê" is the one used to represent "é". In older text and some instances of Portugal Portuguese, "é" is still used with a closed sound.
We used to have "ü" to disti guish between the silent u in "gui"/"qui"(/"gue"/"que") and when it was actually pronounced, but, around 2008, a spelling reform ditched them to make written Portuguese more uniform throughout the countries that speak it.
Obrigada para a informação
Oh, the Acordo Ortográfico... LOL, don't get me started... It was announced by the Portuguese language institute in 1990, then ratified (well, sort of) in 2008. After which it is now in widespread use (both by the general public and officially) _only_ in Portugal. The rest of Lusophone countries (Andorra, Brazil, Guiné Bissau, etc.) simply _refuse to stick by it_ and have continued to use the pre-2008 spelling. That is to say: the general public does. Media and governments (largely) do use the new spelling. Transition has been rough and longwinded though. The agreement was drawn up in 1990, then expected to enter into force in 2004, during a spelling reform. But, as is often the case with these things, it took a lot longer to _actually_ get to that state. In Portugal, the Government signed it into law in 2008, allowing for a 6-year transition (that ended in 2014). Brazil followed suit (officially, at least) in 2009, but is _still_ in its transition. This, again, is mainly the case where non-official use is concerned.
I can't remember ever having seen ü in Portugal, even though I have been going on holiday there for quite the number of years (>30, in fact). I daresay that must have faded in obscurity _long_ before the Acordo ortográfico
@@slashtiger1 Wait, is Brazil still in transition? Because, here, it was a thing. A few diacritics got removed from words, the trema was very widely used and got stomped out of existence, and a few other things like that happened. Now, from what I recall, the reform changed much more drastically the spelling in Portugal, especially words like "tra(c)tor", but I assure you, as a Brazilian, it did affect us to some decent extent
@@pedroff_1 I know. It affected _all_ varieties of Portuguese, but if I’d have to put a ratio to it, I’d say it’s about 80:20 Portugal:others
I hadn’t really thought about ü being used often in Brazil; I guess that might just have been the single most important change for the Brazilian (and other Latin-American) variety of Portuguese. In Portugal, nearly all mute letters before -t- got axed. It's most predominantly visible for C, as in Dire(c)to…
@@slashtiger1 Yeah, I can't deny Portugal ended up witht he short end of the stick overall. Just pointing out at least Brazil did go some changes, even though they didn't affect us nearly as much
After learning English language I felt confident enough to take on Chinese writing system, because it's pretty much the same. You just memorize each word, pronunciation and spelling separately.
Read is the perfect example of why we need diacritics/accents. It can be really confusing to figure out if we're speaking present tense or past tense till you read further.
You forgot the word naïve, which is one in which it's really used currently
It a borrowed word and it’s still correct to write naive.
inglïsh shōd hæv daiacrïtïcs
10:46
Elon Musk: 🙋♂️
The ~ is called, at least in Spanish, "virgulilla" (pd: I used my translator and it translates into "prime"). And it's an accent used on its own, even though that the RAE (Spanish Royal Academy, by its Spanish acronym) considers ñ a letter on its own.
But then, also the "virgulilla" term is used as a synonym of apostrophe and cedilla, but since they have their own name, virgulilla is socially recognized as the name of ~.
At least it looks a lot cleaner without accents.
When I look at Vietnamese writing with all its accent marks, it just looks so overwhelming!
Well that depends on the person then. i see languages without it as just standard, and those with it as more lively
They stick out to you because you're not used to them. You consider it "clean" if you're already used to a language that uses diacritics.
Accents would ruin my alphabet soup.
So get the soup in your tummy before the accents come
In Romance languages Spanish/Portuguese/Catalan/French, tilde and cedilla were originally marks representing superscript "n" and subscript "z", e.g., "riñon" (kidney) = *rinnon: "nn" had the similar job that "ll" has in Spanish today, but it evolved. From Portuguese: "começar" < (unattested) *comẽczar < Latin "cominciare (see Spanish "comenzar", Catalan "començar").
Sometimes, especially in Portuguese, the tilde disappeared and the pronunciation changed: começar originally had a tilde, as did the word "geral" < geeral < gẽeral < Lat. "generalis".
German umlaut marks were also superscripts original in the Fraktur typeface, but as an "e" over another vowel to (usually, but not always) indicate the process of Umlaut: "mäßig" (modest) < *maeßig = Maß (size) plus -ig (-y, -ish, -like). It's why some Anglicised German names are written "ae/oe/ue", e.g. "Mueller" < Müller.
Although diacritics would be especially useful for vowel letters, it may take A LOT of spelling reform for that to work given that so many vowel sounds are used with so many letter combinations.
As an example, the sound “ee” (IPA i) can be used as “ee” like in “green”, “i” like in “pepperoni”, “ea” like in “leave”, “ey” like in “key”, “ie” like in “shriek”, “ei” is used when pronouncing German names (though actually erroneously as that combination make an “ai” (IPA a͡i) sound in German), or “e” like in, well, like the letter E. And that’s just one vowel sound used in English out of over at least a dozen.
Yes. Our spelling is a mess.
But we don't have case endings!
It doesn't matter if the ball does the action, has the action done to it, or if it has the action indirectly done to it, it's still "the ball"
If you are talking to the ball, it's still "the ball"
It most languages, the word "the" has many, many different forms, depending on how the ball is used, when it was used, and if the ball is masculine, feminine or neuter.
And the noun also will change endings based on all these silly things.
Confusing spelling is a small price to pay to avoid cases.
Thank you Danes!
Good point, but we don't have to have either! Having accents to simplify reading and pronunciation won't come at the cost of case endings.
Cases and gender is pretty useful, you have much freedom making sentences eg. in Polish you can make a sentence "Czerwone wczoraj ciepłą nocą kolega idąc z dziewczyną widział niebo" - "Friend saw red sky yesterday warm night while walking with his girlfriend", or word-by-word "RED yesterday at warm night friend walking with (his) gf saw SKY", so like there is a whole sentence between phrase "red sky". It's an extreme case, but pretty often it happened to me that I tried to say something quickle in English but I screwed up word order and needed to say all the sentence from the very beggining xD
On the top of that case system in indoeuropean languages like Latin, Polish, German etc is pretty old hence in many cases insted of literal meanings they have them less obvious and also the forms vary a lot. But for example in Turkish or Finnish there is not much difference between their case endings and English preposition, you can translate it pretty straight forward to English
I'm glad we don't have "counters" in English! You can have one ball, one car, one pencil, one cow, whatever. But, In Japanese and Korean, there are different words for "one", "two', etc. depending on the thing that's being counted, like two animals, two pencils, two cups of something, etc.
As a native speaker of German: I like my cases (makes sentence structure more flexible as I can switch around the parts more as function is clear from the inflections) but I’d love to ditch those silly genders … They do not make any sense and except for some minor edge cases (word spelled and pronounced the same, only difference is gender to determine meaning) adds no benefit …
And the "the" doesn't change either! (looking at you, parent language)
10:16 - MIDDLE English. About 100 years after the Norman ~~invasion~~ conquest, Old English (specifically: Late West Saxon) was dead. And already in Old English, an accent mark similar to the acute accent was used (albeit inconsistently). Later, during the 1180s, a monk called “Orrm” wrote an exegesis of the gospels (which ue called the “Orrmulum”) so that his English dialect could be pronounced as written - but even Orrm sometimes used a breve accent and a double acute accent in monosyllabic words.
We also use the grave mark like in pullèd or sanctifièd to mark that a letter is pronounced that otherwise wouldn't be
At the very least I'd like a way to make them on an American keyboard without having to press 15 buttons and chant a latin incantation!
you can actually. hold down the alt key and type these numbers on the number pad (the thing to the right of the keyboard that kinda looks like a calculator)
á (416)
í (417)
ó (418)
ú (419)
ñ (420)
easy to remember because 420
é (0233)
ô (147)
ö (148)
ò (149)
û (150)
ù (151)
ì (141)
you can type other symbols too like:
∞ (236)
÷ (246)
▐ (222)
█ (987)
§ (789)
æ (145)
Æ (146)
@ Zero Two it’s even easier than that on Apple keyboards. All you do is hold down the letter with the diacritic you want, and every one used in every language pops up.
@@OfficeSupplyRobot yeah that's what I do on my phone. I don't think that would work for laptops however.
@@zerotwoisreal for pc/laptops you have to add the language keyboard in windows/macOS settings and you can use them easily and switch back and forth between keyboard languages (Windows Logo + Spacebar in Windows.)
3:28 Happy Germany
There is an interesting video about the history of Ñ, you should watch it. In short, Middle Age scribes needed to save paper and nasal n were shortened as a ~ above the letters before them. While above vowels, it sounded weird for the Spanish, above n it made a distinctive sound and they kept it as a separate letter. Portuguese use it to distinguish nasal a and o.
totally agree!!! cannot tell you the amount of times i've had to explain to people there's an accent on the e in my name so they stop calling me "zo"! wish people knew what the accent marks meant more, it seems to be falling out of common knowledge for some people
I think the term "accent marks" fits them better because diacritics imo aren't only used to show that a certain vowel is stressed differently. For example, in Romanian we have ș for ʃ ("sh") and ț for "ts" and they are considered separate letters with diacritics. This also applies to two other vowels we have, ă for ə ("uh") and î/â (like the Turkish ı)
Hey, name explain
After seeing your haiku I thought to myself
What are the types of literature/poems/idk what they are called
(E.g. haikus, limericks, rhymes,mantras etc) and how they got their names
It would be very nice if you were to make a video on this topic
Regards
A loyal fan
12:25 Diaeresis isn't unique to English. It's called a trema in Dutch (sounds like tray-ma). We use it all the time, so I really had to get used to reading some vowels separately when learning English
They didn't say it's unique to English though. It's also used in Spanish and is called very similar: "Diéresis"
You might want to consider doing a video about the strange vowels English uses on words borrowed from other languages. A couple of examples come to mind. Crwth from Welsh uses W as a vowel and is pronounced as if it were U. The two-syllable word fjord from Norwegian has only one traditional vowel.
5:40 “ough” in English can be pronounced up to eight of nine different way, depending on which archaic and Gaelic terms you’re willing to accept as being acceptable today as being “English”.
In the german umlauts Ä, Ö, and Ü the dots aren't diacritics. These letters, along with ß are two-letter combinations, AE, OE, and UE which melted into one letter.
And latin has one diacritic, but it is seldom used. A line above a vowel marks, that it is a long vowel.
Well, the trema above umlauts aren't used in the same way as they usual are. In other languages, they show that vocal-combinations which usually go together are voiced independently, while in German, it works the other way around.
Still, the trema is the visual indicator for a change of pronounciation.
That’s how accent marks work
@@fermintenava5911 well this actually is not a trema in the umlauts but what is left of the e. In handwriting often times those aren’t even dots but vertical lines which is close to how an e looks like in Kurrent (old form of writing). Unfortunately most modern fonts use the trema here which basically is not completely correct.
@@pascalnitsche8746 well the results are the same so it’s alright
@@Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzj it is not. It is understood but technically wrong.
But what’s most important to understand is, that it is not a trema even if it looks like one.
Dutch also uses the umlaut, but we call it a trema. We use it the same way as English
Forget about my other question. I was basically asking whether a trema in Dutch is (used as) a diaeresis.
RIP Portuguese usage of trema.
????-2008
English could really do with incorporating letters and diacritics from other languages. For your bass and bass example, you could turn bass (base) into baß but taking the eszett from German since it makes an ‘s’ sound. Or write bass (the fish) by using the long stress mark over the a (bāss) to not only differentiate pronunciation but also give them different spellings.
(6:00) Part tense of "to read" should just be written as "red". Because it's pronounced exactly like the word for colour red. If they are spoken the same, the should be spelt the same. It isn't ambiguous when spoken, so it wouldn't when written either (after people get used to it that is)
Actually, it makes it easier. For example in Polish, there's "może", which means "maybe" and "morze" - "the sea". They used to be pronounced differently, but the consonants shifted their sounds, and we were stuck with different letters. However, nowadays it helps a lot with understanding the different meanings of words which are pronounced the same way.
To conclude, I think the word "read" as in past tense should retain its spelling, so as not to be confused with the color red, but the present tense of "read" should be transformed to "reed"
I always called then "diacritics" and never heard them being called "accent marks".
This is an e with what I call "accent grave": è
and one with what I call "accent aigu": é
I don't even know the German words for them. I only know what they were called in French class. Because they don't even exist in German.
When I was doing French in school, and when I assist in French classes today, we always used the word accent. It's simpler when the learners are only seven.
@@Reichieru1
When I was learning French in school we where taught that the diacritic on the French Éé was called an "accent" but we never called all the extra markings "accents".
TBH I only started calling them "diacritics" because I self-studied linguistics on a hobby-level on the internet.
To me the word "accent" lost all it's meaning. It meant a slight regional pronunciation like American, Irish, British, Scottish etc then a dialect and now diacritic markings. I hate the word "accent" because I confused at what it's meant to mean. Can we get a consistent definition for this one word and not just use it whenever it suits the situation?
About the Bass fish and Bass Guitar. Both are pronounced Bass as in the fish (think treble and bass clefs in musical notation or an amplifier's tone controls). BASE (guitar or other) is a modern term that has become interchangeable with Bass but probably started with terminology referring to anything lower in tone, possibly rhythmic, and a part of music that is the foundation of the song: the base, if you will
Bass clef and bass guitar being pronounced like 'base' may be a modern term, but language evolves, so it's correct...if you say 'bass clef is pronounced like the fish, but modernly it has evolved to be pronounced 'base'' then what you mean is 'bass clef WAS pronounced like the fish' or 'bass clef is pronounced 'base''
I think telling anyone nowadays 'bass guitar is pronounced like the fish' is inaccurate because people will assume you mean modernly and that just...isn't true
I am happy we do have a diacritic system in Filipino, but it’s not used much and thus can lead to confusions in pronunciation given our many homographs (e.g. buhay vs buháy, “life” vs “living”). I use them every day for clarity.
we use the diaeresis in Dutch quite a lot,
we even have words with three times the same letter, one sporting a diaeresis, e.g.
zeeën (seas) the plural of zee (sea)
geëerd (honoured) the past participle (used as adjective and in perfrct non-continuous tenses) of eren (honouring) (note however that whilst the infinitive form has only 1 "e" at the start, conjugations where the r is not followed by an r have a double "ee" at the start, e.g.: ik eer (I honour))
I am not a native speaker and for it was quite easy to learn how to SPEAK english but almost a decade later my writing is still terrible
That is what spell check is for. I'm a native English speaker and my spelling when typing is terrible, because I just grab my default spelling form the set of words that are spelled the same, then correct the spelling as a read my own typing. For example, I almost always initially type "there" whether I mean "there", "their", or "they're". But the sentences often don't make any sense when I read what I just typed, so I fix it then.
@@richdobbs6595 trusting auto correctors is quite risky and some times you can get quite embarrassed after trying to write “ship” but then it comes off as “shit”
Even more difficult for "read" vs "read" is that even in context, it can be impossible to tell them apart. Consider "I read it", versus "I read it". One of them is pronounced "reed" and the other is pronounced "red"; can you tell which is which?
its whatever u want it to be
buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo
Thorough video, English could use accents for sure, would be awesome to have them, would ease pronounciation. As a Hungarian, I missed you mentioning the hungarumlaut, which is the combination of an acute and a diaresis.
In Italian there's only 2 vowels that change sound depending on the accent (e and o), so we don't really use them. Accents are only used if the last vowel of the word is stressed, like "caffè" and "perché". There's only one word that can be confused depending on the accent of the vowels, pésca and pèsca (fishing and peach respectively, which are both just written "pesca"), while there are a few words that can be confused depending on were the stressed syllable is, like prìncipi and princìpi (princes and principles), though these are caused by conjugations.
Actually Latin "had" diacritics.
G is a variant of C. And so is Ç.
The (hi)story of *'J, I, Y'* and *'U,V, W'.* And so on...
I like the fact that English spelling can be so vague. Keeps me on my toes.
Also to make English spelling truly predictable and easy, we’d need to rework the whole thing
How about we just nuke the entire site from orbit.
I feel like this could be useful for ESL students, it's hard to know how pronounce English words just reading them. Maybe writing it out normally alongside the version of diacritics could improve understanding
In my native language of Polish, we have 9 extra letters with diacritics English doesn't include; Ąą, Ćć, Ęę, Łł, Ńń, Óó, Śś, Źź & Żż (also Polish officially doesn't include 3 letters that English has but still used unofficially; Qq, Vv & Xx)
They aren't treated as a slightly different variants of the diacritic-less variant of the letter but they are treated as completely separate independent letters in their own right with a separate sound and placement within the alphabet.
Here's an example of their different sounds;
L makes a L-sound but Ł makes a W-sound (while W makes a V-sound)
O makes the Oh-sound but Ó makes the oo-sound which is identical to the letter U. Ó & U make the same sound and in the past they used to have separate sounds.
Ą & Ę are nasal sounds which other Slavic language speakers hate for retaining from Proto-Slavic.
Here's the alphabetical order; Aa, Ąą, Be, Cc, Ćć, Dd, Ee, Ęę, Ff, Gg, Hh, Ii, Jj, Kk, Ll, Łł, Mm, Nn, Ńń, Oo, Óó, Pp, (Qq), Rr, Ss, Śś, Tt, Uu, (Vv), Ww, (Xx), Yy, Zz, Źź & Żż.
In addition the there are sz (sh in shower sound) and cz (CZechia) diagraphs used in which in other Slavic languages are written as š and č
@@ukaszglinski2687
Polish Latin Alphabet is different from the standard Slavic Latin Alphabet (created in Czechia) used in Czech, Slovak, Slovenian & Serbo-Croatian. I think the Czech Latin is used in the Polish dialect or separate language of Silesian and Sorbian in Germany uses a mix of Polish & Czech Latin alphabets. Polish Latin alphabet is also used in Kashubian a language in Northern Poland around Gdańsk.
It's easy to read Czech Latin when you know the equivalent letters or digraphs.
@@modmaker7617 They are equivalent and that's why I wrote it.
In portuguese we also dont use "K", "W" and "Y". those letters dont exist in the protuguese alphabet. And there is also our weird relation with "ç". its not considered its own letter, but its not considered a "C" derivation. and there is also no uppercase "ç", because words cant start with it.
but like I say: "The spaniards are at sleep, lets post lh, nh, ão, ô and ç.
@@Duck-wc9de
So how would you for example write "Sonic O Ouriço" in all caps if an uppercase "ç" doesn't exist?
"SONIC O OURIÇO" or "SONIC O OURIçO" or what?
I'm so glad to now know what the two dots above a vowel to show that it is pronounced separately is called. I speak German and was defacto calling it an umlaut. Now I can correctly write "coöperate" and berate someone for being naïve in not recognizing a dieresis, and suggest they should reëxamine their criticism.
... The words "naïve" and "cocaïne" both came from French. The former kept the hiatus pronunciation of
"nah-EVE".
But "koka-EEN" became diphthongized to
"koh-CANE".
The French Ë has a completely different meaning than the German Ö.
The Ë means that this letter is spoken individually. But Ö is a different sound than O.
The car brand is called Citroën,
in Germany it often becomes Citröen. But this is wrong.
Don't buy a French car in Holland. It may be a citroen.
Meanwhile in English because that name starts with a C I cannot know how to pronounce it, nevermind making it five letters in to be thrown off by thr accent mark.
I might be wrong, but I'm fairly sure classical latin uses the macron do show long and short vowels os (bone) vs ōs (mouth)
in Dutch we use the ü, ï, ä, ö and ë for the same reason as you could use them in English (Zoë, ruïne, oliën) although there are a handful of borrowed words like überhaubt from German that use the German-style umlaut. The é and sometimes è are mostly used with loan words (or words with a lot of influence) from French, like café, privé, abonné or hè. Other words that use acents marks include: gênant, saté, déjà vu, Curaçao, enquête or piñata . There are very few native Dutch words that actually use accent marks.
I had thought about this, an English spelling reform, long ago. Although I'm not a native speaker, I'll say a few changes which could be useful like:
1. -ee/ea-(pronounced as a long 'e'): ī
Ex: free > frī, agree > agrī, need > nīd... but also: tea > tī, near > nīr, year > yīr
1* verbs which end in -ieve > -īv
Achieve > achīv, believe > belīv
1** -ea- > -ē-
Ex: health > hēlth, heart > hērt
2. -oo-(pronounced as a long 'u'): ū
Ex: foot > fūt, moon > mūn, too > tū
But: door, floor (remain the same, or are written with only one "o")
2* could, should, would > cūd, shūd, wūd
3. -ph- > -f- (always)
Ex: photo > foto, physics > fysics, philosophy > filosofy
4. Th, th (when it sounds like a 'd') > dh
They, the > Dhey, dhe
But not: through, thanks, think (because it's anodher different sound ;)
Interesting, but I think some things could use a change. For instance, the ea in "health" and in "heart" soubd rather different. Also, for words like they and the, I find that, at least personally, I don't really pronounce them as if they have the same sound as "dh".
I completely agree that English could really benefit from diacritics. If there is one word that really bothers me when people forget the the diacritic is résumé, because resume and résumé are not the same word. I don't get why some people refuse to understand this fact. Here's proof:
resume /rəˈzo͞om/, verb
begin to do or pursue (something) again after a pause or interruption.
résumé /ˈrezəˌmā/, noun
a brief account of a person’s education, qualifications, and previous experience, typically sent with a job application.
This is funny, because this is a word we borrowed from French. We borrowed résumé from French. It annoys me because I work in business offices a lot and come across this word a lot.
"Grave" is pronounced "grahv" (the A is as in garden) when talking about the accent.
Kids should learn the IPA early on. Then words can be written in the native and IPA letters. It would make learning languages as an adult so much easier!
Ā feẅ rēádjûstmênts tõ līne spāçeînĝ ând thē wõrds & cĥåráctérs bēcóme lêgîble!
As far as I have heard, the macron apparently was already used in Latin as a lenghtening mark, not sure in which period though.
And if å doesn't doesn't count, then ü, ä, etc. also shouldn't, as they represent a different sound. The same goes for lots of characters with cedillas and hačeks, which in most cases change the sound (Latvian has some 5 or more of these extra sounds).
I find it odd that, although you mentioned diaeresis usage in English, you never mentioned the other accent mark in English: The grave accent.
I personally don't know how to use it. A concrete example I have is "learned": When used as a verb, it lacks the accent ("I learned something today", pronounced as a single syllable); when used as an adjective, it dons one ("the learnèd gentleman", pronounced as two syllables).
All that said, I do enjoy sticking diaereses anywhere I can. Gives me an overinflated sense of pomposity.
As a native English speaker that taught myself 4 other languages, I still find it weird we don't have this.
My mom (who only speaks English) asked me how I can read/pronounce words with all these accents in various languages. I explained how it's substantially easier to know what sounds these words make, even though I've never heard them spoken. English is a mess sometimes.
Latin DID use macrons for long vowels though, didn't it?
Rarely, I believe. Polymathy made a video about them
Yes and still does;
th-cam.com/video/D3bmLi1bKI0/w-d-xo.html
@@Dian_Borisov_SW Are you pro war? Were you in favour of the invasion of Iraq? Or do you think you would have been had you been alive/old enough when the US invaded Iraq?
@@camelopardalis84 the fuck does this have to with anything?
@@canyounotmydude9155 I have my reasons. I will tell the person whom I addressed.
When I started to learn Norwegian I actually started to write the a-part of æ and å differently (with the round part at the bottom). Before, I always wrote a like a d with a shorter line and it was difficult to write æ and å that way. This really helped me to see them as different letters than a. However, I slowly started to write a like that too, but only in Norwegian. My a in German and English is still the "short d".
Catalan makes use of the ç, but also of the · (or punt volat) between two L, I think it is to signal both Ls need to be pronounced (Paral·lel = ) , without it, it should sound as a stronger L (Maragall = )
I disagree, I think accent marks are somewhat of a plague. They needlessly complicate and clutter the orthography of languages (even when their stated purpose is to make things 'easier', paradoxically) and I would go as far as to say that there's nothing accent markings can do that can't be done simply by coming up with unique ways to combine the bare, unmarked Roman alphabet letters. To demonstrate this, I'll take a language with a lot of accent markings, Spanish, and dress it down to just the bare alphabet:
-Why ever use "Ñ" when the combination "NI" always produces a phonetically identically result? Or why not just use one of the several other combinations that produce that sound, like GN (French, Italian) or NH (Portuguese)? Or even just bring back the 'old school' double N, from which many (albeit not all) instances of Ñ descend from?
*España→Espania, Espagna, Espanha, Espanna*
*año→anio, agno, anho, anno*
-Why ever use "Ü" to 'harden' a G before an E or I when you can just use a W? (An already neglected letter in Spanish btw.) Arguably, the GÜ combo could be entirely replaced with a W since the G sound tends to soften to the point of nonexistence:
*la vergüenza del pingüino→la vergwenza del pingwino, la verwenza del pinwino*
-Why ever use acute marks to indicate irregular stress when so many other languages in the world have no such thing, and yet people are able to learn and read them just fine? (Not to mention many Spanish speaking commenters will omit most accent marks aside from Ñ when typing out comments online, and they're understood just fine.) And if there truly needed to be a system to point out where irregular accents lie, why not just use existing letters to do the trick? Consider doubling the letter to indicate stress, or adding an H after the vowel:
*águila→aaguila, ahguila*
*sartén→sarteen, sartehn*
(For the vowel doubling suggestion, some of the vowel doubling that already exists in Spanish might need to be acounted for: leer→leher, crees→crehes, microondas→micro-ondas, etc.)
A sample of how this might look:
_Siempre doy gracias a mi Dios al acordarme de ti en mis oraciones, porque he tenido noticias del amor y la fe que tienes para con el Sennor Jesuhs y para con todos los que pertenecen al pueblo santo. Y pido a Dios que tu participaciohn en la misma fe te lleve a conocer todo el bien que podemos realizar por amor a Cristo. Estoy muy contento y animado por tu amor, ya que tu, hermano, has llenado de consuelo el corazohn de los que pertenecen al pueblo santo._
Not _super_ radically different looking than standard Spanish, as you can see. Of course, none of this would EVER be accepted by Spanish speakers who, like speakers of every other language in the modern age, are set in their ways and probably will never be onboard with such orthographical reforms (nor would most English speakers, which is why I think the very premise of this video is dead on arrival, no offense), but it just demonstrates that extraneous markings can be done away with quite easily.
On the other hand, the major issue with reforming English orthography without the use of diacritics is that the end result would look RADICALLY different due to how inconsistent English is with its existing letter combinations, and the numerous sounds they could make. I have only a half-baked idea of what this might look like (didn't want to waste _too_ much time entertaining a thought that would never be taken all that seriously anyway), but here it is:
_Igh aulways theanke migh God as Igh remembr yeu in migh prayrs, because Igh heer about yor lov for aul his holy people and yor fayth in the Lord Jesus. Igh pray that yor partnrship with us in the fayth may be efectiv in depenyng yor undrstandyng ov evry good thyng we shear for the sake of Christ. Yor lov has givven me greate joy and encorrajment, because yeu, brothr, hav refresht the harts of the Lord’s people._
As a native Spanish speaker the "g" in pingüino and vergüenza is hearble and if you ommit it, it would sound strange in my opinion. I understand your point in the rest of things.
4:50
English spelling does have rules. Native speakers of the same accent pronounce made up words the same. It just has really complicated rules.
Almost all of which have a long list of exceptions.
As I'm on a video regarding the whole accent thing... the way you pronounced the names of different types of accent between 01:40 and 02:20 is WILD!
As a German native (using ä, ö, and ü daily) I found this to be quite an interesting video. 💡👍 BUT what I found even more interesting is that your particular way of speaking English does NOT make use of the "th" very often (if at all), but substitutes the letter "f" for most of it! 🤯 Such a surprising thing to do for a linguist (I presume)! Is that a regional thing, a family thing, or just a personal thing you do? And is it for a lack of being able to form the "lisp-tongue", linguistic laziness, or another reason entirely? I know it's not too extremely rare to find (though I obviously don't know where it's the most common), but I find it quite fascinating! 🤔⁉️ Thanks in advance for any insight you may provide! 🙏
I þink it's British
English is by far the easiest language to learn and read, adding accent marks would complicate it
Oh yea? Now try to pronounce Godmanchester
@@MasonGreenWeed Silly Brit, that's not real english
Its difficulty is made up for by the fact that it's everywhere.