Just to clarify my “that’s where all our problems started !” was a tad flippant, the theory suggests this was a contributory factor to the disparity between spoken and written English.
Melvyn Bragg is not a linguist by training but the book accompanied a TV series so if it contained any serious errors I suggest he’d have been called on them. I do remember that it seemed very well researched tracing various dialect words (still common into the 20th C.) back to the waves of invasion/immigration by the Danes, Jutes Angles et al. However I’m not 100% this book is where I read it nor do I have a copy here, sorry.
PS My dad wrote to Bryson pointing out some of the flaws in Mother Tongue.
This appears to be true, but some are loanwords of rather long date, for example the prefix “kilo-”. To me, it feels like it’s been adopted into French in a way that, for example, ‘w’ hasn’t been yet.
Well, according to Biffy the Elephant Shrew, you can find the word “reëngage” in this week’s New Yorker. This usage is not dead, but it’s found in a limited number of publications. Also, this diacritical mark isn’t actually an umlaut, but a dieresis. (The umlaut is an identical diacritical mark, but used to change the sound of a vowel instead of separating two vowels.)
I missed Biffy’s contribution. Sorry. Apparently the New Yorker hasn’t updated its style book since the 20’s. . . .
I put umlaut in quotion marks because I suspected it wasn’t the correct term for this usage. Thanks for the details.
(I just used “coöperation” in another thread. Be interesting to see if there is any reaction.)
I recall **Kobal2 **using it in the Israël thread after forgetting that it’s used in that word in French but not English.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
My impression is that German added umlauts only in the 19th century. Before that, you used an e, as in the name Zuerich, the word Maedchen, the preposition ueber. I have the impression that the same was true in Scandinavian languages. When in Aarhus, I saw it spelled that way as often as with the A-ring.
A language like Spanish has five vowel sounds. Dialects of English have (I once read) between 22 and 24. This would make it very herd to create a 1-1 mapping between sound and spelling and it would be wrong in every dialect but one.
Finally I happened to be in California at the time of the Ebonics flap. The assertion at the time was that Ebonics was a creole of several African dialects and had no connection to English. This is so obviously a fantasy that it was dismissed out of hand. If it is now used for the American black dialect, I have no quarrel. Only that if African-Americans want to get ahead they had better also learn standard American. I have a friend who lived in a mixed neighborhood whose son grew up fluent in both.
As I said, the term “Ebonics” isn’t used by linguists. It wasn’t quite invented by the people who wrote the position paper for the Oakland School Board, but it was popularized by that paper. Linguists basically despised that paper since it made an utter mess of explaining what AAVE is. Linguists don’t ever care whether a dialect is respected or not. That’s none of their business. It’s their job to describe dialects, not to make up rules about when they are used. Blaming either linguists or the confused people on the Oakland School Board for AAVE is like blaiming a doctor for a disease he’s diagnosed.
But surely Spanish has dialects?
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
They’re older than that, according to wikipedia they were first introduced when the bible was translated into swedish in the 16th century. The danes didn’t adopt å until 1948 however which would explain your observations in Århus.
That’s just like Hmong orthography, where tones are indicated by silent letters, in contrast to Vietnamese which uses a whole menagerie of diacritics for tones in addition to vowel quality.
[hj]
Certainly. The Real Academia recognizes that there are such variations.
However, with what we’re discussing, in the case of vowel sounds the variations are such as do not affect the meaning of the word, and the average literate listener would know that you meant “I” and not a variant pronunciation of E or U. For practical purposes you can speak Spanish just fine using exactly 5 vowel sounds and be understood by just about everyone in the Hispanosphere (save perhaps where the influence of another language is very strong).
Spanish diacrits recognized as such have limited usages – the acute accent most of the time merely signals syllabic stress, not tone or pronunciation (which in turn is also used to split diphtongs - Igartúa is pronounced ee-gar-TOO-ah, while Igartua with no accentwould be pronounced ee-gar-twAh); and ocassionally serves as a grammatical-function identifier, as in unaccented “mi” = my(possessive), accented “mí” = me (1st. person objective). The diaeresis only identifies where an otherwise silent “u” must be pronounced as in “Mayagüez”. (Sure, we perpetuate the myth that it’s this super-phonetic written language, but though learning to read by Phonics is apparently easier in Spanish, as you progress you discover it, too, has quite enough exceptions and irregularities) The tilde is considered an integral part of the ñ, still considered a separate letter, and yes, it’s pronounced like the English ny in canyon, or even better, like the French gn in Avignon.
[/hj]
This is the important point and the contrast with France is the most instructive. Modern French diacritics were largely invented by two of the royal printers, Geoffroy Troy and Robert Estienne, in the early sixteenth century. Other French printers and writers then followed what was seen as a court-led fashion. Had this not happened, French could just as easily have continued without them.
English printers, on the other hand, simply never bothered. Why would they?
It isn’t as if there haven’t been notable dictionaries released in the English language. Although not the first English dictionary, Dr. Johnson’s Son of Dictionary* was a highly influential work, as was the dictionary-cum-speller of Noah Webster in America. I suspect that had there been diacritics added, those books would have been an auspicious method for doing so.
Now we have to wonder: were those books popular because they didn’t have diacritics, or do we have no diacritics because those books were popular?
Given the examples from Old English manuscripts where diacritics didn’t appear much even in longhand from the 12th century, I’m going to guess the former. English writers were already accustomed to going without.
*Sorry, it’s a Blackadder joke.