As far as I know, every other European language incorporates some form of marks over the letters, additional letters, or other augmentations to the Latin alphabet. They’ve even gone back and added macrons to Latin. English, however, does not use them except sometimes in the use of foreign words. Why did every other European language (or at least the vast majority of them) adopt diacritic marks and additional letters, and why did English not do so? What was the impetus for doing so in the first place?
I’ve long wondered this myself. It would make a huge difference in Anglo-American typography if we hadn’t gotten all accustomed to never using any diacritics at all, and consequently too lazy to ever bother typing them. Further, sometimes not even being conscious they exist.
In the French language forums at wordreference.com, they have a strict rule that “accents are not optional in French.” I love them for that. Sad that Anglo-American participants need to have that drummed into their heads.
Although…
The dot on the Latin letter i originated as a diacritic to clearly distinguish i from the vertical strokes of adjacent letters.*
I don’t know the answer to your question, but I wanted to point out that English does use–or has used–the dieresis in a few words like coöperate and naïve, although the mark is almost always omitted in modern usage.
And it’s not like we need them in English (well, for some senses of the word need; it’s definitely one of the things that makes it hard to learn as a second language); everyone knows you don’t say “couperate” or “nayve”. But since English makes do pretty well without them, I wonder why there was almost universal adoption in other languages.
English used to have a “è” (as in cursèd) to give an indication as to how the word was pronounced. “Cursèd” had two syllabled, but “cursed” (actually more likely written “cur’st”) had one. That pronounciation differentiation died out after Early Modern English (e.g., Shakespeare), so the accent wasn’t necessary.
As for other accents, there weren’t many cases where they were necessary. French accent marks indicate certain pronunciations (e.g., the cedilla indicates a soft “c” where you’d expect a hard one: “façade” in French is pronounced “fa-SAHD,” while “facade” would be prounonced “fa-kade”), but in English proununciation of vowels is guided by accents and usage, not regular rules (for instance, “finger” should by the rules be prounounced as “fin-jer,” since a “g” before “e” is usually soft). In any case, accents weren’t needed for English pronounciation, so they were not used.
I never thought the Shakespearean accent was actually used in that time. I always thought it was a relatively modern addition to help actors out. And there’s no reason why France needs diacritics; they could just say “facade is pronounced ‘fasad’, deal with it” like we do in English, e.g. “project” (v.) vs. “project” (n.), to the delight of foreigners.
No, the difference between curst and cur-sed is quite old.
And shouldn’t the question be why the romance languages added diacritical marks, not why English lacks them?
English grew out of an Anglo-Saxon base mixed after 1066 with large numbers of Norman French loan words added. Modern German, however, only uses one diacritical regularly, the umlaut. The French loan words were rapidly Anglicized.
I’m not sure what the status of vernacular printing was at that time. Most official documents were still in religious or court Latin.
It is true that Latin texts did use them. You can see them in the Domeday Book (although some of those might be stress marks for reading aloud, which clouds the picture) and in the Gutenberg Bible. They don’t show in Germanic-derived works. William Caxton’s Polychronicon from 1495 uses old English but shows no diacriticals. Here’s a German vernacular piece from 1572 with no diacriticals. That’s from this page, which has many examples of printing from that era.
You’re making an assumption in your question that English somehow lost diacriticals that other languages had. It’s not at all clear that’s a good assumption. You’d need to study the development of diacriticals in the romance languages to see what the chronology is.
Heh, how often do you say cursèd in daily life? Are you sure you’re not one of Shakespeare’s peers?
I can only speak from my own experience, but it seems to me that indicating pronunciation in English is just a losing battle. I mean, sure, I could write naïve, but there are so many other weird pronunciations that it seems a little unnecessary. It’s much harder to get everyone to use them unless everyone’s already using them, and no one does in English.
Incidentally, this got me thinking about how glad I am that English doesn’t, given modern keyboard layout. It’s far, far easier to only have one of each vowel to type.
I think also English never had a single standard or anyone who cared to try to enforce a standard.
Furthermore as communication got easier you had two major English countries, the USA and the UK. So it was harder to adopt standards.
France was a major power but you never had any other places speaking French becoming a rival or France. This is true for most other countries.
In my day the speak called “Ebonics” for instance was looked down on. Now it’s said to be just another form of speaking English, instead of being bad English.
Out of curiosity, I tried to read the articles on French wikipedia about diacritics, but I quickly lost interest, since the pages mostly explained what the sign marked, or used to mark, often using big words that I don’t understand, some of them I didn’t even know existed (was any French speaker here aware of the existence of the verb “amuïr”, copiously used in this page about the “accent circonflexe”?).
All I can tell is that it’s apparently the work of grammarians, who deemed important to be able to note in written text subtle or not so subtle differences in pronunciation that or might not still exist in modern French, or just in order to get rid of formerly pronounced letters who weren’t anymore when the diacritic sign was added, or even by ignorance or mistake. As to why other writers thought it was important enough to keep using them, I wouldn’t know. Though in some cases, the diacritic is indeed indispensable to tell apart two words or two tenses in writing. I’m not sure how English deals with such homographs.
I found an interesting trivia, though : in some case, the “accent circonflexe” was added just to give more prestige to a word, like in trône (throne) or suprême
I’ve ranted before on the recent simplification of German spelling, which tossed many diacriticals and extraneous characters into the dustbin. OTOH, since we English speakers started doing it centuries ago, I feel no such need. You wanna speak phonetic? Knock yourself out. Or learn the language. It’s not like French will help you.
No, I’m not. Where did you get that idea? I merely phased the question like that because English is one of the few European languages not to use them, not because I thought the precursor languages had them and English stopped. And while that’s interesting that the Medieval Latin books had macrons in them, it is my understanding that they were not found in Classical Latin, so they must have been added in the meantime.
Also, it’s very easy to type accents if you turn on the US-International Keyboard under (Vista; it also is on XP, but I don’t know the path for that) Control Panel->Change Keyboards->Change Keyboards->Add. To type (using a as an example) à hit then a; to type á, hit ' then a; to type ä, hit " then a; to type â, hit ^ then a; to type ç, hit ' then c (or right Alt-c); to type ã, hit ~ then a, etc. [Here](http://www.starr.net/is/type/intlchart.html) is a handy chart, also covering the special characters like £, €, ø, æ, and ß that must be typed using the right Alt key ( ’ " ^ ~ are the only keys that work like that).
The OP says English has no additional letters not found in the Latin alphabet, but this is wrong. English does in fact use letters not found in the classic Latin alphabet. Of course, the Latin alphabet had only 20 or 21 letters (depending on if you count the K or not) so there’s 5 or 6 letters (the others are J, U, W, Y and Z) that English has that Latin doesn’t.
Now you may say that most European languages that use the Latin alphabet have those additional letters, and that’s mostly true. However, the Romance languages don’t use the K and there’s only a few languages that use the W. As far as I can tell, of the major European languages only English, German, Dutch, and Polish have the W as a letter.[sup]1[/sup] The others may include it in the alphabet, but only use it for foreign loanwords and names.
[sup]1[/sup] Some minor languages such as Walloon, Luxembourgish, Breton, and Welsh also use it.
> In my day the speak called “Ebonics” for instance was looked down on. Now it’s
> said to be just another form of speaking English, instead of being bad English.
This is confused in several ways. First, what is “the speak” mean? The dialect? The language? The manner of speaking? The speech? (That’s the closest to what you’ve written, but “the speech” is not a standard way of talking about a dialect or whatever.) I’ve never heard anyone use “speak” as a noun. What are you talking about here?
Second, no one with any training in linguistics uses the term “Ebonics.” The proper term is “African-American Vernacular English” or “Black English.” “Ebonics” was created (or at least popularized) by someone with a confused notion of the subject who was trying to explain what a particular school district was doing about their treatment of students’ dialects. Anyone who uses the term “Ebonics” hasn’t actually studied any linguistics.
AAVE is no more or no less respected now than it was ten or twenty years ago. Linguists have for the last forty years ago studied it as a dialect of English. They never claim that it’s now become a socially acceptable dialect. Indeed, linguists never would make that claim about any dialect. Linguists don’t consider it their job to judge the acceptability of a dialect. It’s their job to describe language, not to proscribe ways of speaking.
As one of the few users who actually has a diacritic in his username, I feel I must react.
I think that the fact that English has no diacritics reflects the generally unregulated status of the language, and the poor relation between what’s written and how it’s pronounced. In most of the cases that I’m aware of, diacritics were introduced into languages at a stage when writing and printing picked up and someone thought of some way to make everyone’s life easier and standardize the language and its spelling. For English, this just never really happened, I guess. And if it did, someone did a really bad job.
For the record, Russian is also pretty low on diacritics. It has a distinction between ‘ye’ and ‘yo’ which is expressed by putting two dots over the ‘ye’ to make it a ‘yo’, but this is optional and you see it very rarely in print. Which is a crying shame. Then there’s a little macron over the I to make it a J, which is not optional now.
Just look at words like knight and you’ll see that many english words are spelled differently than they are currently pronounced. “Knight” used to be pronounced more like it is spelled, but pronounciation changed and the spelling didn’t.
This is especially a problem for vowels…many times it seems that the written vowel chosen to represent a sound in an english word is just picked at random.
Sad that Anglo-American participants need to have that drummed into their heads.
