Why did English not adopt diacritics?

Factual Questions
21

Actually, there are a number of typographical changes in various European languages that are now called letters but which, at the time, were properly ligatures.

The ampersand (&) is a good example. Technically, it is a ligature formed by the letters et: “and,” in French. One could argue that W is also a ligature, I suppose: double-U, which is not unfamiliar to Latin. Even the eszett (ß) in German is a ligature of long-S and z.

If I had to make an educated guess, I’d pin this one on scribes and printers. (Usually I’d say the Babylonians but this time they had a good alibi.) I doubt that literacy was widely spread in the early days, and most scribes were located in only a few centers, bound by a common religion, and they would be likely to copy a common style that they all used. The later printers probably created a simplified typography to match what the scribes were doing by hand, locally — after all, certain ligatures would arise more frequently in some languages than in others.

But why didn’t the scribes see fit to add diacriticals to their work in England? English has Germanic roots, and the Germans didn’t use many diacritics either; England was also invaded multiple times by the Romans, the Jutes, by the Norse, and the Normans (themselves an offshoot Viking colony). Beowulf doesn’t appear to have many diacritics and that was Old English. Perhaps English had too many outside influences for any one set of diacriticals to stick?

Wikipedia’s page on Old English suggests

There also don’t appear to be diacritics on the first page of Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, c. 1400 or so. The Great Domesday Book, a record made by William the Conqueror of all the towns and livestock, clearly seems to have diacritics in it (but I’ll be damned if I can tell you what language it’s written in). Ol’ Billy was Norman French, so that might help us rule out the Normans as an influence on typography.

So what could be the cause? Heck if I know. Given that Alfred the Great was an educated King, who made translations of his own from Latin, who compiled a Doom Book of his own (codifying laws, mostly), and who made a pilgrimage to Rome in his youth… I dunno. It could’ve been Latin influence. Or maybe the Babylonians.

22

Check post #7 for the answer.

23

Thanks, that’s a much better picture anyway. I don’t know why I didn’t see your post above. :slight_smile:

24

Greek had a Z but Latin did not?

25

You know, that’s curious; I’d never noticed it before. I’d always assumed that the Etruscans borrowed the basics of the Greek alphabet, and the Romans later adapted their alphabet from the Etruscans.

On Z. Apparently it was in Etruscan and early Latin texts but as the sounds shifted in the language, Z passed out of use. It was only used thereafter to represent zeta, in Greek loanwords.

26

French uses the ‘k’. It also uses the ‘w’, but almost exclusively in loanwords.

It is true that “and” in French is “et”, but I believe that the ampersand originated as “et”, meaning “and”, in Latin.

27

Same word, same spelling, same alphabet, same origin… French, Latin, what’s the difference? :smiley:

28

I just encountered the word “reëngage” in this week’s New Yorker.

29

Actually, not much. Most of the time, the sound “k” is represented by a “c”. Words with an actual “k” are also loanwords. Picking up a dictionary at the letter “k”, the first words I find are loanwords from : Hebrew, Breton, Japanese, Kabyle, Russian, Aramaic, German, Japanese, Japanese, Hindi, Assamese, Greek, Japanese, an Amerindian language, Japanese, German, Greek . That’s the first two columns. And the “k” entry is pretty short, anyway.

30

This is why the New Yorker kicks ass.

31

There is the theory that the pronunciation we have today stems mainly from one region while the earliest printing was based on the English spoken in a different region and that’s where all our problems started !

As far as vowels are concerned our convention is to indicate how they should sound by adding actual letters rather than diacritics. These letters are silent.

Compare the vowel sounds in the following - cap / cape; sit / site; fat / fart; filing / filling.
Similarly we manage to indicate different consonant sounds by using different letters or letter combinations.

For the sounds represented by the Polish L Ł W we have L W V.
We have a sound similar to the Spanish ñ but write it “ng” - ban / bang; sin / sing

32

The Spanish ñ doesn’t sound like “ng” in bang or sing.

33

I concur - it is not the same but it is similar and English speakers, at least in the UK, learning Spanish are “helped” in their pronunciation of ñ by being told it is like the “n” in words like “sing” and “bang” (before you get the closing “g”).

34

Huh. We were taught that it was like the “ny” in “canyon”.

35

Same here - certainly makes El Niño a bit strange.

36

I’m British, I took some beginner Spanish classes in the UK and was given the “help” I cited above. A friend teaches Spanish to secondary school kids in the UK and I’ve heard her use the same analogy. However I apologise for not including this caveat in my post.

But, leaving my crap Spanish aside…

My actual answer to Vox Imperatoris was that written English uses letter combinations to show different sounds where other language might use diacritics. The “e” in “fate” isn’t sounded but influences the “a” sound (from “fat”) in the same way an accent would in another language.

37

Cat Jones writes:

> There is the theory that the pronunciation we have today stems mainly from
> one region while the earliest printing was based on the English spoken in a
> different region and that’s where all our problems started !

Not true. Most of the oddities with English spelling are because a word continues to be spelled as it used to be pronounced, even though the pronunciation has changed since then. For instance, the word “knight” is now pronounced as if it were spelled “nite.” At one point the “k” was pronounced and the “gh” was a sound like “ch” in German (or certain Scottish dialects). At some point, English speakers began to cease to pronounce “k” before “n.” At some point, they ceased to pronounce the “gh” sound in the middle of words, and the vowel before it was lengthened. Where were you told that the differences in pronunciation and spelling stemmed from using one dialect for spelling and another for pronunciation?

38

There was one customary usage that died out in the twentieth century:

Whenever two adjacent vowels in a word belonged to different syllables, the second carried an “umlaut”; e.g., coöperate; coördinate. (I’m having trouble coming up with examples; maybe the rule applied just to double o’s, where the need for that or a hyphen between the o’s is pretty obvious.)

I don’t think I’ve seen this in either print or writing since the Sixties.

39

Yeah, I do know about the spelling being a fossil record of pronunciation. To be honest I’ve read quite a few “armchair” books (as opposed to specialist linguistic books ) which talked about the history of English so I couldn’t tell you where. Possibly Bryson’s Mother Tongue or, more likely, this one by Melvyn Bragg.

It was something to do with Caxton coming from Kent and the dialect from Oxford or East Anglia or somewhere becoming the dominant influence on spoken English.

40

The Mother Tongue is a fun book, but it’s full of mistakes. I’ve never read The Adventure of English. It’s also by a non-linguist, so I suspect that there are some mistakes there too. Does anyone here have some authoritative knowledge if it was true that spelling came from one dialect and pronunciation from another.