Accent marks for the uninitiated.
Almost every language that uses the Roman alphabet has diacriticals on at least some of the vowels to help guide you in the pronunciation. French and Spanish, a lot closer to Latin than English is, has them. It would help in guiding even native speakers through sentences like…
I was going to lead you to shore but my lead keel has grounded on a sand bar. The wind is rising; better wind the sail down before it gets shredded.
We don’t need those namby-pamby foreign squiggles over our vowels… Chaucer managed okay without them.
Actually, it’s probably because printers couldn’t be arsed.
No diacriticals? You obviously have never read the New Yorker, where coöperation is very common.
It’s hard to find any definitive answer online, but the consensus I saw when looking around is “English was just too irregular.”
You are correct in noting that diacritics were added in other languages to help make pronunciation easier. But Middle English was already such a hodgepodge of different languages and esoteric pronunciations that there wasn’t really one set of rules for diacritics to make things easier. No one system caught on, and thus, when print came along, it wasn’t codified like it was in these other languages.
That’s not to say that diacritics were never used. But they were never used consistently, and thus never became codified as part of the language itself, rather than an optional clarification. Recently I had to fix a Wikipedia image because a native speaker complained the lack of diacritics made the word into nonsense. That doesn’t happen in English.
The only ones I see today are the odd diaeresis on words with a second vowel to show it is pronounced, and putting an acute accent on final e (or the e of final -ed) to indicate it should be pronounced. Otherwise, they just sometimes come in on foreign loan words until they get completely anglicized.
Don’t be naïve. Ask the well-learnèd Brontë sisters.
Oooh, serendipity! I was considering asking about diaereses in English and why they’ve been disappearing.
As a kid, I was taught that
[ul]
[li]when a diaeresis appears on the second of two vowels, it indicates that the paired vowels are not a diphthong, and[/li][li]it’s almost impossible to use a diaeresis in English without seeming affected and self-serious. [/li][/ul]
As a deeply fancy person, the second point—while true—doesn’t bother me at all. But as a reader, I appreciate getting a signal that a given set of vowels isn’t a diphthong. Without a diaeresis, the pronunciation of cooperation is utterly irregular: English phonics dictates that oo is pronounced ooh.
A reader—especially one who’s not a native English speaker—is simply expected to know/memorize the fact that the pronunciation of cooperation is irregular. A native speaker may well know that the word started out as co-operation and got shortened, but that sort of knowledge disappears with time and familiarity.
Even a native speaker who hasn’t encountered naïve before could find the diaerisis a helpful pronunciation hint, and the proper names Zoë and Chloë seem to have kept their diaerises longer than coöperation has, possibly for pronunciation reasons.
English spelling and pronunciation are only loosely correlated already, so I’m a little sad to lose the diaeresis and the dollop of phonetic consistency it supplies. In a language where bomb, comb and tomb don’t rhyme, I’m inclined to keep any tools we have for making pronunciation clearer and more consistent. (My pedantic quirks won’t slow the death of coöperation, of course).
Besides, we fudge non-diphthongs into diphthongs all the time. Take zoology, for instance. Most people pronounce it as though it were spelled “zoo-ology” even though English phonics dictates a pronunciation that rhymes with eulogy. The correct pronunciation, of course, rhymes with, uh, “dough-ology”. This is because the term comes directly from the Greek[sup]1[/sup] ζῷον, in which the omega and omicron describe two different vowel sounds. English represents both phonemes with the single Latin letter O, which makes the pronunciation ambiguous.
I think zoölogy would be a beautiful word, but Google Ngram shows that despite a popularity spike in 1905, zoölogy has never been a common spelling, especially compared to plain-Jane zoology.
I don’t care how anyone else pronounces the word, but I pronounce zoology to rhyme with “dough-ology.” This gratifies some people (zoologists and fellow pedants, mostly) and astonishes the rest (due to the wacky affectation). It’s a lost cause, just like coöperation.
The demise of the diaerisis in English is likely due to the inevitable streamlining and dynamicism of language, but I’d like to think it’s also a rejection of the arbitrary and hideous metal umlaut.
[sup]1[/sup]This isn’t common knowledge for the same reason that the evolution of co-operation won’t be common knowledge in the future).
Not many people can be arsed about anything before they’re born. Chaucer died in 1400, which happens to be the same year Johannes Gutenberg was born. Gutenberg’s famous printing press didn’t appear until 40-50 years after Chaucer died. William Caxton introduced the printing press to England when he used one to publish—wait for it—The Canterbury Tales in 1476.
Maybe by “printers” you mean “the scribes who printed books by hand.” In that case, I must ask: have you seen the Ellesmere Manuscript? Calling the scribe who produced it “detail oriented” is a little like asserting that Audrey Hepburn in her prime was “kind of cute.” That Chaucer scribe most certainly could be arsed.
(I realize your post wasn’t entirely serious, of course).
The New Yorker style guide has some strange quirks. It is, hands down, my absolute favorite magazine, but some of their stylistic affectations have been criticized and even ridiculed, often by their own writers. I think the editors just enjoy the display of eccentricity.
As for diacriticals, as a native English speaker I’m amused by their prevalence in other languages, because in English one generally sees them only in the pronunciation guides in dictionaries. It’s as if the native speakers of certain languages have to be reminded how to enunciate the words of their own language. 
Caxton doesn’t seem to have seen the need for them: British Library
Of course, it’s okay to use them on imports like café.
Bob, I’m not sure why you felt the need to repost my link to the British Library’s page on Caxton, but as far as I can tell, it doesn’t address Caxton’s feelings about diacritics at all. I included it only to support my claim that Chaucer died before any printer published his work.
My point in mentioning the chronology was only to highlight that The Canterbury Tales preceded any printer’s opinions about whether diacritics were worth the trouble. It had to: it preceded the existence of printers.
I took your first post to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and my response to it was meant to have a similar tone. Specifically, the phrase “wait for it” was intended to convey that I imagined that you were thinking of Caxton when you wrote “printers.” But tone is notoriously hard to read on teh interwebs; as forum posts go, that was probably too subtle by half.
Do you happen to know that Chaucer’s original manuscript used diacritics that Caxton and/or succeeding printers dropped?
If so, I’d love to see any cites you have handy. And if not, I’m less exercised about this than my previous post might have suggested.
The basic reason is that English has too many vowels (22-24, I read somewhere, depending on dialect) and too many dialects. In particular, London had a plethora of dialects that made any consistent spelling impossible. For example, each of the variants of -ough come from one or another dialect. In my Philadelphia dialect, the modal “can” and the noun “can” have different vowels.
I’ve never heard of that! What vowels are they?
English as it’s written and pronounced are already fairly decoupled*, and adding more characters doesn’t really do much to reduce that ambiguity. Which sound should “á” represent? The Czech one? The Icelandic one? In all likelihood we’d still be in the position of having to memorize what each word sounds like, and it’s not like French, which does use diacritics, is a walk in the park, pronunciation-wise. So we use the existence of diacritics to provide the vaguely helpful hint, “don’t say this the way you might be thinking about saying it, you naïf.”
Unstressed is often /kən/ instead of the typical /kæn/. Although I’ve never noticed that being a particularly Philly thing
You can get æ-raising or -tensing in Philly/Bmore English, but I don’t think that’s what was being referred to.
This sort of thing can cause fistfights in the international editing community. I’ve known editors, usually American, in Thailand who strongly held that sentiment, to say the least.
Nah, it’s because 12-year-old girls like them, especially to make them little hearts instead of dots.
I’d bet for every well-learnèd, naïve Brontë sister you find, I can find ten without. Wanna cooperate?
To me, it’s more like they’re just different letters, but instead of making up new ones, or adding an extra modifying letter (like an “h” to make an “s” an “sh” sound), they use diacritical markings. There are many word pairs in these languages where they mean completely different things depending on whether they have an accents mark or not, and what accent mark it is.
It’s interesting how Spanish splits the difference. Ñ is considered a separate letter in most dictionaries (but then again, often so are CH and LL), while the “accent” (á, é, í, ó, ú) is not. The former change the sounds of letters, while the latter just change the stress (or, sometimes, don’t change anything – just help you distinguish between homonyms).
Whether diacriticked letters are considered distinct letters or not is usually reflected in the collating sequence (i.e. alphabetization) for that language.
For example, in French, diacriticked letters are alphabetized with the non-diacriticked letters of the same shape. So they’re just considered variants of those letters. OTOH, Scandinavian languages each have three diacriticked vowels, but they’re put at the end of the alphabet after Z, so are considered distinct letters. The fact that English usually drops the diacritics and then treats Å and Ä the same as A (moving names from the end of the alphabet to the beginning) disturbs some Scandinavians.