Why doesn’t English have accent marks (except in foreign borrowings like passé or café), when all other European languages (that I know of) do?
There are certainly instances in which accent marks could be used…
To distinguish homonyms (?) such as lead (verb “to lead”) and leád (metal, past tense verb) or read (present tense “to read”) and reád (past tense).
To indicate whether a past tense suffix is a seperate syllable or not, as in listened versus giftéd (or do other phonetic rules may already determine this?). I know “learned” can be pronounced in 2 forms anyway.
To indicate whether vowels are seperate or form a single sound, as in coóperate versus scoop. I have seen the name Zöe spelled with an accent so it wont be rhymed with “toe”.
Would this just confuse people even more? I think that it would help people who are learning to read. It certainly makes other languages easier to navigate. Of course, a basic element of the English language is its resistance to the sort of order that German, French, and Spanish take for granted. But was there a decision made to not use accents in English?
I’m English and my English education was appalling! (In Britain, the Scottish get better English tuition, in my opinion.) I forget who it was who said that the Brits & Americans are divided by a common language. How true! Possibly you would need to ask an etymologist. I’d like to, too. I’m fascinated by language development. (Dutch people, for example, seem to know English more correctly than native speakers, maybe their teachers are qualified in this area!?) I can not, alas, answer your question but I wish to join you in the asking of it, if you don’t mind.
One question for you though…using the ‘rules’ (ha ha) of English pronunciation, can you say this word? “GHOTI” I’ll give you a clue, and say that it is not similar to “goatee”.
Once I tried to determine if any other European languages written with the Roman alphabet kept company with English in using no diacritics or special characters whatsoever. At first I thought of Dutch, but Dutch sometimes uses the diaeresis over the e, like this: ë. I came to the conclusion that the only other European language without diacritics is Basque. English and Basque, that’s it: the only two European languages you can write with plain ASCII. For every other language you need an extended character set.
There are non-European languages, for example Malay and Swahili, written with basic ASCII, no diacritics, but they have only recently adopted the Roman alphabet and were previously written with the Arabic alphabet. I was only looking at languages that have the Roman alphabet native to their writing.
As for question 2 in the OP, in fact English orthography did use to employ the acute accent for that very purpose: for example in learnéd. “I learned the hard way not to play with fire” vs. “Parson Snooks is a very learnéd bloke.” For some inexplicable reason this is now obsolete. jaimest, have you read many books published before WWII? If so, you ought to come across this from time to time.
As for question 3, English used to use the diaeresis over the e to show it as a separate syllable if necessary. When it was written next to another vowel. My acupuncturist is named Zoë and spells it that way with the diaeresis. Again, why this useful practice became obsolete is a mystery.
SmackFu, Germanic, so what? Consider the orthographic inventory of the following Germanic languages:
German — ä ö ü ß
Swedish — å ä ö
Icelandic — á é í ó ú ð þ
Would it make it any less hard. Sure maybe it would make it easier for foreigners to read, but most Americans and Brits dont seem to care about making things simple for foreigners. Our spelling system would still be very odd, and we just have another stupid rule to remember. And changing the spelling is hardly an option because it seams like it would obscure meaning a bit. Plus seeing so many schwas would just get really old after awhile. As for Umlauts, they remind me too much of eighties heavy metal bands to take all that seriously.
As fate would have it, computer technology was developed in English-speaking countries, the one language that doesn’t need special characters. Which explains the dominance of plain ASCII. And why the various extended character sets are not compatible with one another. The English-speaking computer scientists, in blissful ignorance of other languages, blew off diacritics and special characters altogether when EBCDIC and ASCII were developed.
The result is that you can never feel safe when transmitting anything beyond the plain ASCII 64 characters. You’re liable to have them changed into garbage characters on the other end. Any of us who work with foreign languages have had this happen all the time. If I.T. had been developed in France or Czechoslvakia, fully accented character sets would have been standardized from the outset.
Now, if only everyone would just go ahead and implement Unicode already . . . what’s the hangup with Unicode? What’s taking so long? Unicode is the fix to this problem.
Umlauts are not the same thing as accents at all. You might as well say puntuaction marks are accents, too.
Umlauts are basically the letter “e”.
All umlauted vowels can be alternately spelled without the umlaut and with an “e” after the vowel. This is what I do when I email my German friends because I cant get my !*!@#! keyboard to make umlauts. Umlauts do nothing to change where the accent or stress is, but function to change the vowel pronunciation much as our “e” changes “can” into “cane”.
I would not be surprised to see German phase out the umlaut in the next 50 years or so. They have already taken step one to eliminating the scharfes S (its the thing that looks like a B).
AHunter3: Those words are spelled with umlauts to this day in The New Yorker for some reason.
Jomo Mojo: English at one time pronounced the “e” in “ed”, thus “learned” would have been 2 syllables as a past tense verb. This was dropped, and at the time of transition “learned” people lamented (as always) about the destruction of the English language. Some adjectival forms are preseved, though, as in the example you give.
This surprises me because the unpronounced “e” in “ed” is actually closer to English’s German ancestor (which uses a “t”).
Umpteen hundred years ago, German added the ‘e’ after umlaut characters, because, then, the umlaut didn’t exist, just as regnad kcin said. So, a word like Übermensch would be spelled Uebermensch. German monks got the bright idea to shorten the word a bit by placing the ubiquitous ‘e’ over the vowel. Eventually, that ‘e’ became a pair of dots, thereby forming the famed German umlaut.
Don’t the French use umlauts? I saw a few words in French once that had those (one of which, if I remember correctly, was noël.) Does the same history apply, if they do? Did French monks have the same idea, take it from their neighbors to the east, or are there no words in French that have umlauts, and I’m just horribly mistaken?
Oh, and regnad kcin: the Germans didn’t eliminate ‘ß’. They merely simplified the usage rules, which reduced the number of times this character appeared in writing (or so they say… I’m not worried; I don’t use the ‘ß’ anyways…). The Swiss never used the letter, though, using a double ‘s’ or an ‘sz’ as the spelling of the word demanded. What may go next in German is noun capitalization. The next spelling reform may eliminate that, I hope, as Danish did in 1948.
Im well aware of what they have done with the scharfes S, and I have got to say simplifying its usage is by no means how I would describe it.
I didnt say they had eliminated it, but had taken the first step in that direction.
If I were going to eliminate the letter, I would just go ahead and do it. Instead it has been eliminated when it occurs after “short vowels” (unless its in a persons name, a city name, etc), a sort of half-assed elimination. I would give examples but I dont know how to create the character unfortunately. While “short” and “long” vowels were once clear in German, they no longer are and many Germans are unclear when the scharfes S should be taken out and when not. Lots of Germans I know say “screw it, I’m doin’ it the way I was taught in school”. Whereas total elimination would solve any clarity problems. (However there are also LOTS of Germans who still capitalize du, dich, and dir).
The point of this, one assumes, would be to make German compatible with international computer usage (as the Spanish ll was eliminated as a single distinct letter). If this is true, umlauts must be next in line. I dont see how removing noun capitalization would accomplish anything other than remove the one tiny thing that aids the learning of an already absurdly (and unnecessarily) complex language.
French does not have umlauts (a diaeresis indicating a change in the vowel sound). What French has is a trema (a diaeresis indicating that the two vowels are not a diphthong). Apparently, “noël” is so spelled to indicate that the “e” is pronounced separately from the “o”.
