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In writing words with accented letters longhand, the natural impulse is to write the letter first and then put the accent on top (n then ~ to make ñ) or underneath (c then ¸ to make ç). Keyboards work the other way: one presses something which does nothing by itself - hence the term "dead key" - then
one presses the operative letter key to make the whole accented letter appear. This is a holdover from typewriters, where a dead key actually produced the accent (it had to - there was no RAM to hold it in waiting) but did not move the carriage forward. One then pressed the letter key to go with the accent and moved on. This unnatural gesture is no longer necessary: it is quite easy to program an accent key so that one hits it *after* its target letter; the cursor then can slip back (so to speak) and place the accent over or under the letter. I know it's easy because I programmed my favourite word processor to do it for some accents.
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I wonder how religious the Europeans are about putting in those accents. They seem pretty superfluous (or at least compared to Vietnamese or some accent-riddled alphabet). I bet that when online, they let them go. And so I ask those of you who interact with European (or Mexican) internet material: do they let the accents slide? |
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Where have I been inconsistent with tenses? I use the present tense for the present and the past tense for the past. As for the need for accents... (sigh, cough, gurgle) ...okay, I guess you guys are Usanian. Anyway, thanks for caring, boysparks (but if we're referring to the written rather than the spoken word, shouldn't we say "Anglographic" and "Francographic"?) |
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Much of the user base of this site is not US. |
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It's all over the globe. US, Mexico, Canada, Asia, UK, Holland, Australia, Scandanavia and I'm sure there are others. Maybe South Africa and South America but I cannot think of any specific example users from those countries. |
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Is Mexico in South America?, cos Pericles lives there. |
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I am squarely in the US. The english language has plenty of dumb stuff, and if we are to have a dictatorship I hope that our Attaturk at least makes the language phonetic. But even easier than changing the spelling of a word is ditching the accents. I like simplicity, and I cannot see their merit. |
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Sorry, I wasn't referring to the entire population of the halfbakery, only to those who think we can do without accents. I'm fairly confident they are all in the US - tell me if I'm wrong. Bungston, spelling reforms are tolerable once in a while; several countries have had them in the past 150 years, but oddly enough some of those countries still have accents. The problem is that there are many more sounds than letters in a reasonable alphabet, so representing every sound (which is what you want to do if you reform spelling, because you want a sound to be written consistently in all the words containing it) you will either have accents or resort to combinations of letters - or maybe adopt the international phonetic alphabet. English solved the problem by keeping every old word written the way it was written some time back in its history, regardless of how the pronunciation has evolved, so you have laughter, daughter, etc. You just have to know. It's rather charming. It's one of the reasons I fell in love with English as I got better at it in grade school (French is my first language). But I am curious as to why it seems to you that ditching accents would be easy. What languages do you know? |
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Good idea - that input method does seem much more user friendly. |
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If your native language is largely accent-free and you want to know what your suggestion of ditching accents feels like to a native speaker of an acccented language, imagine someone suggested merging W and V because, after all, what is a "W" but a "V" with extra swish.
Yeah, you could survive it, and you can see how someone who doesn't know the language would come up with it, but it's not really something you'd consider actually doing; and it feels wrong to read and neglects changes in sound and meaning that occur when trading w for v. |
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I feel like some word processing programs do this automatically - WordPerfect comes to mind, though I don't know why and I can't back it up. |
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There are some features of orthography which can be removed quite easily, such as the capitalisation of the nominative first person singular pronoun. Only English does that so far as i know. Similarly, German probably doesn't actually _need_ to capitalise nouns and Spanish doesn't need to insert acute accents to distinguish homophones, because in speech all of these features do not exist and there's no more ambiguity than in writing.
I've always felt rather sad that modern English has got rid of diacritics and extra letters. English looks very plain and boring compared to many other languages written in this alphabet as a result.
Special characters in APL were produced by overstriking and i think they sometimes still are: maybe we could do the same with diacritics. The first time i used a computer with a video display, i was surprised and disappointed that it didn't allow overstriking. |
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/ so you have laughter, daughter, etc. You just have to know./ |
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Probably this is why it seems reasonable to me. I did not consider that accents are necessary for a closer approximation to phonetic spelling. Your description of English is accurate, and it is not a good way to depict words. |
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I speak french and read spanish. I can get by with pig-latin. |
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English is a force of nature. Let it run free........ |
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Only dying languages have to be protected by rules... |
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Minimal, that's why we's got 'Ebonics,' ya dig? |
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//English is a force of nature. Let it run free// Isn't this a little naïve? |
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Accents help to indicate stress in some cases, yes, [miasere], you're right. But they also (and I'd say more importantly) indicate vowel type - an e with an acute accent on it sounds quite different to an e with a grave accent on it. |
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This is a real bugbear of mine, as Those In The Know decided a number of years ago to do away with the acute in written Gaelic, leaving only the grave, which is used as a stress mark rather than a pointer to the vowel sound. This decision was allegedly made to try to make the language easier for learners, but all it's done is mean that people learning a word for the first time have no idea how to pronounce the vowels. |
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This decision has led me to proclaim, grrrrr, gnnnnnn and arrrrrggggghhhhh. |
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So a + from me for an idea with helps make using accents easier. |
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// I wonder how religious the Europeans are about putting in those accents //. We (they) are pretty religious about adding the accents as it changes the way a word is pronounced and sometimes changes the word itself. Not using accents is the same as misspelling the word. I don't think it fair to say that you could avoid the accents entirely. |
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And it's not just those people who have a generally non-accented language as a mother tongue. English adopts words from other languages that should, when written correctly be accented such as café or déjà vu. I'm not sure if it's laziness or a lack of knowledge of deadkeys that stops English speakers typing these words properly. |
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The japanese borrow words from english, and change them to make them fit better in the japanese language. So with role and naive. They lost their accents when they came over. If you speak english and want to use these words, you just need to remember how they sound, like you do with laughter and daughter. |
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It is interesting to me that the authorities on Gaelic decided to scrap an accent. Perhaps it is like genetic drift - easier to accomplish changes when there are fewer individuals involved. |
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For instance, I can't find the Foreign accent key... |
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Does anyone know whether Hawaiian uses accented characters? |
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EDIT:
IIRC, It's only got 12 letters. |
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Bungston is absolutely right: a word which becomes naturalized into English should lose its accents (maybe with some rare exceptions to avoid confusion, like "lamé" so it won't be mistaken for "lame"). "Role" is a common English word; if I don't think of it as French when I am in English mode - and I don't - then I'm sure no-one else does. |
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UnaBubba points out that grave and gravé are not the same. Even more so are Besançon and Besancon not the same! Leave out an accent and, in some cases, you might get a leettle roughed up... |
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Hawaiian does not use accented letters, but i think, with the exception of Dutch, Flemish, Manx, Scots and English, all European languages use them, although i'm not sure about Basque. Outside Europe i'm not sure but none of the following use them: Swahili, Indonesian, Samoan and Zulu. I think that when the colonial power used a language without diacritics, the latinised language tends not to do so either. There seem to be quite a few languages with a single accented letter, e.g. Afrikaans and Welsh. |
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Welsh has enough interesting rules without needing accents, thankyouverymuch. |
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/the same keyboard can educate me/ |
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I propose a language specific "Clippy", decked out in appropriate national headgear / facial hair, who appears to deliver commentary about the need for accents and other things you ought to be doing. |
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"You appear to be typing in gibberish. Stupid American." |
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"Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelled of elderberries!" |
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