What do you think? Can we add any more accents from other languages?🌍 Start speaking a new language in 3 weeks with Babbel 🎉 Get up to 60% OFF your subscription ➡Here: go.babbel.com/t?bsc=1200m60-youtube-robwords-jan-2024-promo&btp=default&RU-vid&Influencer..Jan-2024..TATAM..newyearspromo&bclid={{creator_id}}
I just think adding too many diacritics makes text looking cluttered and it might rather hinder fast reading than helping it. A spelling reform would be the better solution.
@@MoLauer- I think that after adopting the convention, we would get rapidly used to it and sight read it with ease. The problem comes with the speed when we write with it.
The overdot. I love it. This is so, so much better than simplified spelling or Shavian because the transition to it would be simpler. Warning: Geoff Lindsey will be coming after you over “the schwa is never stressed.”
How do other languages incorporate these “word decorations” into keyboard use and handwriting? They do make a lot of sense. Possibly just a few would be enough to solve the majority of our language madness. The whole lot starts to feel very busy.
I simply absorbed English as a child without really knowing the rules. Then aged 60 I learned to speak basic Mandarin (a lesson every day for 5 years from Chinese University students!) and the world changed. Then I went to China to teach English at high school when my ignorance of my language was exposed as my admiration for my students increased. English is much harder to master than Mandarin if you ignore the characters. I can understand a little Maori as most can in NZ (they also use the macron) but learning Mandarin has changed my life as you so rightly say. Keep up the good work.
Yup, Māori also uses the macron to signify elongated vowels. Mana and māna are completely different pronunciations and meanings. 😊 Mandarin uses accents to signify different tones, but that’s another story.
I think English is a lot easier than its reputation but Chinese in general is a very easy language. It’s just so foreign to us with so many strange sounds that are difficult to hear for us that it takes a long time to learn. But when you compare English to fusion synthetic languages like Ukrainian or Latin you start to see just how easy of a language English is.
Fun fact: the silent "K"s in words like "knight", "knife", or "know" weren't always silent. You used to pronounce the K, but somewhere along the way we got lazy and decided to drop the K sound.
I was watching a film in Swedish and they were pronounding the K in knife. Also Portuguese words pronounce the silent letters like psychology. So it sounds like pee-see-co-lo-ga. Maybe I'm used to it but I like it because it's written how it sounds.
@@snoopyguy21 I'm pretty sure the "psi" in psychology is originally pronounced _exactly_ how it's spelled, it's a Greek letter. It's just like how the K in knight wasn't originally silent, you make a P sound then immediately break into an S and then a long I, like saying "pssst" to get someone's attention, except the T is replaced with "sigh". In fact, the very term "psychology" is entirely Greek, the transliteration of the original spelling would be "psykhelogia", original spelling being "Ψυχολογία". Ψ
German has retained some of the Ks, Like in Knie = Knee. You didn't mention it, but if you learned English and French, learning German is like a breeze.
People often think that the "funny" letters we have in Swedish: Å Ä Ö, are just variants of A and O, as if we were using umlauts. They are not. They are in fact separate wovels, and placed last in the alphabet so we have 29 letters in the alphabet (used to be counted as only 28, as W were considered to be a version of V, and not a letter of its own).
That's because they don't know the difference between an umlaut and an accented letter. The latter is just any letter with any accent mark. The former is a regular sound change for plurals, past forms, and the like. So "goose->geese" or "mouse->mice" is an umlaut. I think this got muddled because the German umlauts are both, and as such, the letters got named "a umlaut" etc. in English.
Much like in Spanish, until fairly recently 'ch', 'll', 'ñ' and 'rr' were treated as distinct letters and I believe dictionaries treated them as following c, l, n and r respectively, so for example "coche" would come _after_ "cocuyo". (My Spanish/English dictionary, which is about 25 years old, after the "C" section has a page headed "CH" that notes that words beginning with Ch are "now" found in amongst the C's, which suggests it was a new thing at the time).
@@stevieinselby Extremely minor correction from a Spanish speaker: Ñ is still considered a standalone letter, probably because that ~ doesn't appear above any other letters so we see it as part of an unit. You're correct about everything else however!
@@stevieinselby I've had a quick look and the change was officially made in 1994 (only for ch and ll, ñ has never stopped being a separate letter), and there are people who still talk about them as being distinct letters. In fact, it appears that the two standards co-existed for some time. Until recently, Windows offered two different language options for Spanish, the only difference between them being whether ch and ll were considered separate letters when it came to alphabetical order.
As both a spanish and french speaker, I truly appreciate attention on the grave accent. Both french and spanish do differenciate between same-written words just by placing a little accent, and I've always thought that it would be a truly useful thing in english
The words estas and estás are not written the same way. The (lack of) diacritics make them written differently. Diacritics help pronunciation (a temporary problem for a few people) at the cost of writing efficiency (a permanent sacrifice for every English writer). It's an awful idea. The average writing and typing speed of the English-speaking world would drop dramatically in order to facilitate and integrate these new characters. The letter "a" is much, much faster to type and still faster to write than "á." differentiate*
Note also how, due to efficient rules, Spanish doesn't need two distinct diacritical marks: the acute accent serves both to mark the stress ("bastó" vs. "basto") and differing meanings of the same word ("Él te dio el té."). The latter is called is called "acento diacrítico".
The accents in French simply stand in for consonants dropped from the originating Latin roots. That they also differentiate pronunciation (in Parisian French) is just a consequence.
@@encycl07pedia- I don't know if you are a spanish speaker, but you took an awful example. Sure, "estas" and "estás" are pronounced very differenly, but you're forgetting about "el"/"él", "si"/"sí", "tu"/"tú", "mi"/"mí". Sure, we only have one accent visually, but there are three different uses for it, "acento diacrítico", "acento ortográfico" and "acento dierético". You gave an example of the "acento ortográfico", and that wasn't what I was talking about.
@@pietergeerkens6324most French natives I know dont even bother when writing by hand, or informally. They do however use them when writing something down for me, a non native speaker...
@@jojogirn6076 Oh, come now! I care, and roaneriks cares, and it's easily possible that Rob cares. But I don't care for your comment. Was it really necessary, even though you have the ability?
As a non-native speaker, I invented a similar system years ago, to mark the pronunciation of english texts. Beside the macron, I also used the circumflex for long vowels, to distinguish between 'hōpe' and 'lôser', and between 'māke' and 'grâss'. To mark the [ʌ] sound, I used the caron (pǔtt vs. put); for the 'a' pronounced [ɔ], i used å (åll).
OR, you could use the 5-vowels system a as in father, e making the ay sound as in stay, i making the ee sound as in meet, o making the o sound as in hope, u making the oo sound as in root, and: Ää for apple (äpl) Ëë for else (ëls) Êê for other (êŧr) Ïï for it (ït) Öö for olive (ölïv) Üü for shook (šük) Ţţ for think (ţïŋk) Ŧŧ for the (ŧê) Šš for shake (šek)
You don't need these. The silent e itself indicates the long pronunciation of a (é-like) and o. The usual convention is that when a constant is placed in between two vowels, the first vowel is to be pronounced by the name of the letter. Now, it is a little harder to read compared to simply having a diacritic on the vowel but if this convention were consistent, it would not be a big deal. The problem this convention is not consistently followed; for example, give is not pronounced gaiv. live (verb) and live (noun, as in a live stream on RU-vid) is another example, where the convention is applied for one meaning but not for the other.
I feel like this could be done for people learning a language through textbooks as a pronunciation guide, rather than implemented everywhere, sorta like with Filipino (we technically have accent marks and diacritics, but they're only really used in certain textbooks and dictionaries, rarely irl).
@@DCMAKER133 Em japonês eles tem 3 alfabetos o kanji que é igual ao chinês, e o katakana e hiragana que são fonéticos. Eles são todos mesclados entre si quando se escreve frases.
@@TheUniverso_sky I know that but on some documents they put a 2nd row of text above to help children who are still learning the written language. I can't recall what it's called or if it's part of katakana or hiragana. Or maybe it was hiragana written above katakana that I am thinking of.
I think that the 6 diacritical marks that you propose will be a tremendous help to those learning English as a second language. I have tutored a Vietnamese person, and she was frequently baffled by the way that certain words were pronounced. I don't think that it will catch on for regular publications, however. A similar feature exists in Russian, in which emphasized syllables are accented in grammar books, but omitted in regular publications.
Given the fact that pinyin is an invaluable tool for learning Chinese, an english spelling with diacritics might actually be very helpful just for teaching purposes. My English teachers just glossed over this kind of stuff. I remember how I was fascinated by the following entry in the conjugation table of my English book read read read Three homographs, two homonyms, three different meanings. After years of actually speaking English, I still stumbled over English weirdness. This really makes the language unnecessary difficult.
@@B0K1T0 IMO that’s because of tones. There are two major options when marking tones in languages with them: using diacritics or using silent letters, both can look weird.
Also about accents in Russian: there’s a similar feature regarding the letter ё (yo, representing /o/ after palatalized consonants and /jo/ in several other cases) which for the sake of I can’t fathom who can be replaced by the letter е (ye, more or less the same for /e/ and /je/). It’s obligatory to use ё in language learning materials but almost never anywhere else: the rule states that it should be used only in proper names, or if the spelling is otherwise confusing with another word (like _все_ ‘all.PL’ vs. _всё_ ‘all.N.SG’, but many write _все_ in all contexts anyway), or if the word is so rare that it would be read incorrectly (like toponyms). I find this garbage because it’s not as if it would be in any way more economical to omit the diaeresis, nor is it significantly simpler to type (there’s an issue that ё is usually located at the same key the tilde is in most of QWERTY layouts, and that’s bad but the damn letter still can be typed in and it’s not that frequent to fuss over). And what’s more, this conservative rule is not even much followed in practice. This inertia or laziness stems from folk status of ё as a half-letter (despite being taught in schools that it’s a regular letter) which is in part due to this letter being forked from е just a couple+ centuries ago, despite the sound change happened earlier but was deemed colloquial and low-register for a while. Because of appearing first due a very regular sound change, nowadays in most cases ё is still somewhat redundant because the contexts of this sound change in native words are still easily recognized. But after being introduced, ё found uses outside those contexts, and using the letter in those is a very much separate matter. And then, being systematic and using ё in all contexts looks like the simplest thing to do, but noooo. (Also as Swedish letter å was invented at almost the same time or earlier, I would be glad if ё was instead е̊, because then it would better show how it’s read, but alas. Using diaeresis in this way is IMO very weird-but who am I to argue with Karamzin, bah. People would want to write е̊ even less than they’re content with writing ё right now.) Hope my rant wasn’t too unbearable. I type/write all of the ё letters in my conversations and I can’t fathom why people are against that too much. (I sorta get why they don’t want to write stress accents on each word, but writing ё would be needed way less often.) But despite weird words occurring rarely, they do so often enough to catch me time to time. Also it’s not even the full picture of the literary language being shameful of using ё: there are cases of using йо and ьо instead of ё for various reasons which again I personally find a historical mess which could and should be simplified. Oh orthographies! Also, references: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(Cyrillic) Probably more useful than my rant. 🙂
I agree that it would make ESL much easier. As an additions, using diacritical marks in text would substantially improve text-to-voice and voice-to-text applications, increasingly common in translations. And a greatly expanded table of such marks would be useful for the numerous English variants and accents.
I'm a native Turkish speaker and I learned English as a second language and I'm glad my language inspired you! English is easy to learn, hard to master, and with all these silent letters pronouncing it is a nightmare. Using accent marks is a very cool idea!
I am not native speaker of turkish. My turkish sounds as similar to turkish that know one ever noticed i am not from turkey but this is first time i am hearing this rule about ğ. In my native azerbaijani we do have sound for ğ and its pretty much same sound that turkish people make. I do not think ğ is just silent g. Sometimes it is silen ğ and peole special from western turkey drop ğ. They say erdoan elongating o but not always. In eastern turkey people do make sound that corresponds to azerbaijani ğ. To me ğ is just one of thouse sounds in turkish you have to know how much to use it in different words.
to be honest this is just in my opinion 😅 but as a person with the native language also doesn’t use accent mark, it’ll be overwhelming to learn english with it.
I also have a tendre for those two, but I see two difficulties. First is that in pre-Caxton English they were interchangeable - the word "the" had a voiced theta sound, but was conventionally spelled with a thorn rather than an eth. Doing it any other way now looks funny, probably because of all those "Ye Olde Teashoppe" signs. So reviving both seems a bit redundant. The other reason is that they are both so bloody difficult to write, for a modern penman. How do you keep the thorn from looking like a p? An if eth looped the same way round as a 6 it would be easy - but it doesn't!
Let's merge t and h together. Some ligature. We take the horizontal line from t and add to h. And get the voiced ð sound: ħ. And a backwards ħ would mean voiceless sound. Horizontally or vertically mirrored. Or, we leave ð as the voiced and use ħ as the unvoiced. I ħink ðat wið suç system ðe spelliñ kud bekom raðer effektiv.
FUN FACT: besides the diaeresis over the letter u rule ("agüero", "pingüino"), Spanish *also* uses the diaeresis over the letter i, to mark a syllable separation, as you describe ("hïato" instead of "hiato", for example). It is *very* seldomly seen, however, as it is exceedingly rare to need the mark; people will intuitively know the difference OR the separation will be made explicit by an acute accent on the last letter ("Mi pie." vs. "Yo pié.").
@@RobWords Very professionally done as usual. There is a problem with the hyphen - although very short it is still too long. In the UK we have traditionally used a numeric decimal point at mid-height which I understand is called "midline" as in 23·4. However most people put the decimal point on the floor as in 23.4 probably because the is no mid-point on the keyboard. What about using a midline decimal point instead of a hyphen as in co·operative or mid·field or ex·patriate or sixty·year·old person? It's much neater and better than a diaeresis (which we should call an umlaut as in German). Being so simple it would get used more often in questionable cases than a hyphen. [PS I's hard to judge in this present script because there's not too much difference]
It appears also the 'ü' just as well is used to spell a /w/ sound, or maybe just in the /gw/ combination. A plain 'u' before 'e' or 'i' would otherwise only serve to harden the preceding consonant as in "guerra" .
@@patrickcorliss8878 I believe I've occasionally seen that midline dot to separate syllables. Separately, aren't there some languages that use commas and periods/full stops in numbers the opposite way? 2.000 for two thousand and 2,34 for two point three four?
Hello Miguel, In my Entire life as a Native Spanish speaker I have never seen another vowel in my language besides "u" with diaeresis. I needed to search for it and what you've said is half True, Half False. "Ï ï" used to be (Now it's not used and it's a rule not to be used like that) written when certain poets needed extra syllables in their poems so they were correct based on the poetic composition they have chosen. Such like: "No las francesas armas odïosas, en contra puestas del airado pecho..." (It keeps going. You can search the name like: "Garcilaso de la Vega, Soneto XVI". But it was also used in "Ü ü" without a "g" behind. Such like: "Qué descansada vida la del aquel que huye el mundanal rüido" (Fray Luis de León, I. Oda a la vida retirada) Both Garcilaso de la Vega and Fray Luis de León were from the XVI century, and after that you'll never see those uses for the diaeresis. So if you don't want to write poems, destroy the language so it fits the rules for the poetic composition you've chosen or sound like someone from ancient times.... Never use "Ï ï" and "Ü ü" only for "Gui" and "Gue" when you also want to pronounce the "u". And about "Pie" and "Pié": "Pie", it's a noun. "Pié", Old way to spell the "Primera persona del singular del pretérito perfecto simple de indicativo" of "Piar". But the "R.A.E." (Real Spanish Academy) discontinued it in 2010 and was replaced with just "Pie". Even if you find a conjugation with a diacritical mark for this verb, it will be "Píe" in the "Presente del Subjuntivo". So your example is not only incorrect but also useless for this.
I like all your videos, but this one is perhaps my favorite because I have thought of this ever since I was a young child learning English in my Spanish speaking country. I started using the Spanish accent symbols then to help me with the English pronunciation and I still do sometimes when learning new challenging words. I am a senior lady now but as we all know, learning new vocabulary is a never ending joy. Thank you for all the effort and information in your videos, you are a great teacher.
In my retirement I've taken on the role of a teacher of English as a foreign language.. I commend your efforts, as my students lament that "live" (I live in Thailand) and "live" (live performance) or "read" (I can read English) and "read" (I have read that book) are frustrating - along with all the other random vagaries of spelling and pronunciation.
English is a second language for me. It's so refreshing and an absolute relief for me to listen to you, for all the reasons you say in the videos. Somehow I made the language problems my problem. Glad to know I'm not crazy, or at least I'm not crazy alone, for thinking we can better ourselves and the things we use and care about.
As a native English speaker, I still get confused so don’t beat yourself up. I still have problems with live and live, lose and loose, read and read! Learning English as a Second Language must be a nightmare!
Being Dutch, this totally makes sense 🙂 In Dutch, you always know how to pronounce a word just by reading it. (There are some rare exceptions). Quite different from English 😄
@@marflitts but there stil is no orthographic distinction between 'read' and 'read'. How do you know if 'I read a book' is in present tense or past tense?
@@aperson1 If you never looked up Dutch pronounciation and you're not able to make a proper Spanish "J" sound, I think you may find a lot of words that can be challenging like geen, uitschakelen, goed.. or place names like Nijmegen, Scheveningen, Den Haag (The Hague), .. and probably also the place where you'll start your trip to the Netherlands, Schipol airport ;-)
I have to say that this is indeed crazily efficient for learning. Reading a new text (for learning English) and immediately seeing the silent letters would save so much time!
As a native spanish (spanish is given as an example in this same video) speaker, when i read a spanish text i read it at exactly the same speed as if it had none. And spanish has only the ` tilde, it would likely be far slower if it had other tildes that changed the meaning of the word. It's not efficient at all.
You misunderstood my comment. I only meant that I would save time learning the language. Just having the markers in a text for learning the language would save me the time to check every pronunciation of a new word. And this a common thing you have to do in English because pronunciation is not directly given in the writing.@@Merluch
@@rafaelmijares369 spelling doesn't matter in that case. You still understand she said indicted. There are wackier spellings in other english dialects.
My first language was Portuguese, where there exist several of the ideas you suggest (but using different types of accents). Brazilians and Portuguese from Europe are always discussing spelling and often disagreeing on the accents. As for your suggestions I had hoped you had shown multiple texts with your transformations. Foreign language students of English have often thought some of these innovations would be good, but then again, learning to read and write English wouldn't be so much fun. It's fun to guess, and you get used it in the end. It took me some time to see that stream is really tongue in cheek.
From a Welsh perspective: We use circumflexes to indicate long vowels when they'd otherwise be short. Grave accents are used to indicate vowels that are short when they would otherwise be long - mostly in loanwords. The acute accent is used in two ways - firstly to indicate a stressed final syllable and secondly on a w to show it's to be pronounced as a vowel and not a glide. Finally, diaeresis is used to show that two vowels are pronounced separately rather than as a diphthong.
This is something similar I've worked on. It is done using a pronunciation lexicon I created from the CMU pronunciation dictionary, a lot of data mangling, and turned into javascript code. Here the circumflexes are used when vowels take the sound of their names, i.e. thé âpè Êvè, îçý côld, ûśèd thé hand wårmer: MŶ FĀTHER MEETS THÉ CAT One-wőnè côld rainý day when mŷ fāther wáś-woś a littlè boy, hê met an ôld allêy cat on hiś street. Thé cat wáś-woś verý drippý and uncómfòŕtáblè sô mŷ fāther sãìd, "Wōūldn't yöü lîkè tó/tö cőmè hômè with mê?" This surprîśèd thé cat-shê had never bėforè met anyone-ãnýwőnè whö cãrèd ábout ôld allêy cats-but shê sãìd, "Î'd bê verý much óblîĝèd if Î cōūld sit bŷ a wårm furnáçè, and perhaps havè a sauçer of-uv milk." "Wê havè a verý nîçè furnáçè tó/tö sit bŷ," sãìd mŷ fāther, "and Î'm ŝūrè mŷ mőther haś an extrá sauçer of-uv milk." I've got some books online but I can't post the links in here. Above is an excerpt from My Father's Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannet. The books allow you to customise the way the formatting is added.
Our company (I'm in Austria) recently got those Renault "Zoe" cars. Before we had our Umlaute, we used "e" after the vowel to change it. So I just love to call those tiny tin cans "Zö" and everyone hates me for it 😂
More taking and degrading of Greek words, Zoe is Ζωὴ, not Ζω. Reminds of western maths people taking the Greek π, spelled πι, and calling it pie, when the correct pronounciation is same as English P. At least not as bad as using a Greek Goddess for running shoes, or stealing the Greek alphabet to use as a virus list. Maybe another good reason for, as I previously suggested, using in the English alphabet, η for the long ee sound, respectfully correct usage.
@@stephenremington8448 I think that was a joke. It's a haha about how "Zoe" would be read the same as "Zö" in German. Nothing about thinking that that's how it's actually pronounced.
When I was working at the supermarket (in Germany), the...well...not so linguistically educated colleagues always mispronounced "Moët"🍾. "Haben wir noch Möööt im Lager?"😂
As someone who grew up speaking both English and Japanese in the same household, English writing used to really confuse me! In Japanese, our long sounds are emphasised in multiple different ways. When we have a long vowel, we typically add the vowel twice. For example, おじいさん and 叔父さん。The first word means grandpa. じ is pronounced as "ji", but grandpa is pronounced with a long i, so we add い which is "i" to make it "jii". Altogether, this word is "Ojii-san". But wait! When we write in English characters, or "romaji", we also use the macron! So in English characters, it's written as Ojī-san! The second word, 叔父さん/おじさん means uncle, and is simply pronounced Oji-san. Another example is ありがとう which means thank you! It's written in romaji as arigatō, but we actually add a "u" to signify the long o, so in actuality, it's arigatou! And finally, with consonants, we use っ before the consonant sound! So, for example, ta is た、and tta is った！
10:10 so cute that you listed Spanish syllables using the English separation rules (i.e. corBATa, aspiraDORa instead of corBAta, aspiraDOra) -- as someone who struggled to understand English syllables at first, it's fun to see that the confusion goes both ways!
i find this incredibly fascinating as i took 3 years of spanish and never personally collided with this problem. personally, señora hache told me if i could just roll my r’s it would solve me woes (i never did lol)
@@caseyhamm4292 it only really matters when writing and nowadays with text in computers it's rare to see hyphenated text as we used to see in printed books. Case in point: RU-vid comment lines are not justified, so the computer has no need to maximize their length using hyphenation.
@@caseyhamm4292 it only really matters when writing (you won't really think of the rules when reading) and nowadays with text in computers it's rare to see hyphenated text as we used to see in printed books or when writing in notebooks.
English separation rules? Don't American and British English have different rules, too… BTW should we all throw in soft hyphens when writing on computers? Is it justified? (was that a pun‽)
As a native speaker of portuguese, I never noticed english's accent problem until I saw it in the internet, like in your videos, Rob. But I have to say it: I really enjoyed this idea; hopefuly it will get traction. 😊
i love how youre not just willy nilly assigning jobs to diacritics but youre also looking at how theyre used in other languages. trying to reform english spelling is almost impossible but at least now ive learned a few more things about some glyphs
14:54 Ironically, while the 4 meanings listed include; 1. 'a gift', 2. 'now (current time)', 3. 'present a prize', 4. 'pre-sent (sent before)', There are also more nuanced definitions, such as 'here (current place, ie, "I'm present.")', or the difference in adjectives and nouns (eg, being present in the present). So while the addition of the accent marks helps differentiate some of the definitions apart, it still isn't foolproof, and unless we want to keep adding multiple graves to denote the potential 3rd or 4th definition of a word that is spelt and pronounced the same, it unfortunately doesn't solve the whole problem, and has the potential to add even more confusion.
It mostly solves it, not completely (and it's impossible to completely solve as you rightly point out) but it's better than nothing. It always baffles me how people prefer no solution to a mostly working solution just because "it doesn't solve everything" and then they go on to live their live the worse way possible.
I love this idea! Over the last forty-odd years I've studied six European languages and that experience has made me very aware of the shortcomings of the English language, in particular the way it is written and pronounced. It desperately needs tidying up!
This is the easy part. The trigraph "aoi" in Irish is not consistent : for example, is is pronounced "ee" in "Taoiseach", but pronounced "uh" in the first name of the actress Saoirse Ronan (IPA symbols are hard to type)
I think this would be a good method for English learners, and could be used as a tool for differentiation in accents. For example, you said the word "Brother" would include two schwa's, but in the American accent, it only has one! Pretty neat.
The problem with the stressing thing is that different dialects and versions of English put stress on different syllables, For example, in British English, the stressed syllable in "allele" is the first one, but in American English it's the second.
Not that much of an issue, we already have a bunch of other words that are randomly spelled differently in the US due to nationalist nonsense, or pronounced nonsensically in Brtiain because... reasons. And that's before you get into the Actual dialects (of which the USA has plenty but Britian has an absolute excess... and then there's the rest of the English speaking world). Just mark the spelling variant the same way you do for any other word affected by that split. More importantly, which syllable is stressed strongly influences the pronunciation of the entire rest of the word, and the stress pattern is often the only difference between two closely related words (generally a noun/verb, noun/adjective, etc. pair.)
I’ve always wondered why we don’t use those marks 🤔 I think we should. Also I think some of the silent letters in words tell you context like the K in knight differentiates it from night. Same pronunciation but different meanings. English is an odd mix of everyone’s language and spelling 😵💫
I don’t know…. Spoken chinese is much much worse and is rarely a problem. Even written Chinese has that problem to a limited extent and it’s just not an issue. Could all languages be burdened with rules to make it more clear? Sure, but it adds more rules to learn kind of killing the benefit. Look at all those folk that would rather type in English than their native language due to their problems with typing
Okay. Now type that comment using those diacritics and then tell me how much better it is. Or just write it down by hand. All it does is sacrifice usability, efficiency, and speed in order to help people who don't know any better pronounce words... and they still have to learn what the diacritics mean anyway. Meanwhile the rest of the English-writing world has to get carpal tunnel syndrome to accommodate them. I remember how much of a chore just typing enye in Spanish papers was (as evident that I'd rather spell out the word and this notation rather than type the character itself). I'd go and just copy/paste it from a web search. And that method doesn't work well with accented vowels in Spanish. Adding diacritics to English is a horrible idea in practice.
I am in my late 70s and grew up in a community of mixed Mexican and White Midwest Americans in Santa Fe, NM. The school had a constant battle just getting about 80% of the student body to speak English and that problem rubbed off on us white students. I am a voracious reader, even in grade school and early on used a dictionary to find the meaning of words but could never understand the symbols for pronunciation of the word since my classmate spoke a different langue. Your new symbols would be an immense help to me even now. My ignorance of pronunciation has greatly held me back in life, I sounded so ignorant at times when speaking or reading from the written word.
I have seen a quote attributed to different very smart people that says "never judge someone for mispronouncing a word they learned from reading." Also, if it helps, my worst personal example of this is that I thought "Penelope" was pronounced similar to "envelope" and was mercilessly teased for if.
Very interesting! It’s too bad they didn’t take a bilingual approach. (By the way, my family is from Zacatecas, Mexico and I found that my ancestor who was born not 40 miles from my grandparents birthplace, was the founder of Santa Fe in 1598).
I don’t think that silent letters were put there just to “show off”, but more that they make the etymology “preserved”, which is really important when you take loan words from SO MANY sources like English does. EDIT: By the way, thank you for slotting into the Tom Scott shaped hole in my heart
@@thatotherted3555aren’t there some British people who pronounce the p in receipt? I don’t know how long that’s been going on for if at all, I might be thinking of when I heard ESL speakers say it.
I love this! I teach English to 7, 8 and 9 year olds in New Zealand and I immediately saw the value in your fabulous idea... learning English is so hard for all the reasons you have stated, and more, I'm very keen to support your accent campaign 👍 Here in NZ we have Te Reo, the language of our Maori people and it uses the macron to lengthen vowel sounds which then can completely change the meaning of the word. Languages are certainly fascinating. Thank you for your channel, I've been enjoying your videos for some time, I'm just not someone who comments often. Much Love (two words that would benefit from your accent system, I just need to remember which ones go where 😂) xxB 💖🇳🇿
@@JackHolt4658 I've created a dictionary that associates sounds to letters (not just words to transcriptions - it is more granular) and associated code that adds similar formatting automatically. Get in touch if you are interested. Comments with links to some of this work get deleted unfortunately.
I love when you discuss english in relation to other languages. I went down a fun linguistic rabbit hole when you called a haček a caron. Always learning new things! What a fun video! Thanks Rob!
Great video, Rob! I speak Brazilian Portuguese as my second language, and when I first started learning a few years ago, it only took 1-2 lessons before I had the same thought. "Why don't we use accents like this in English too?" Portuguese's use of the grave accent is particularly cool: it's a contraction. So, I could say "Vou a a praia (I'm going to the beach)," but those double A's look ugly. So instead, you can combine them! "Vou à praia." I love it.
I’ve always been a fan of indicating diaeresis, though my personal solution-of-choice in most cases is an interpunct: Co·operate Re·elect Pre·emptive It’s intuitive to those who already use the hyphen, but less intrusive. It also avoids the confusion with German umlaut. Also, if we expand the rule from “pronounce the vowel separately” to “pronounce each half separately” you can use this to distinguish acronyms that act like a “word” from those that act like a “series of letters”: RADAR, LASER, NASA, etc. wouldn’t use dots, while a·k·a, i·e, U·S·A, etc. would use them! For aesthetic reasons, some loan words may not need to use this bc it looks “wrong”. For example I think Zo·e looks weird when compared to Zoë. “Na·ive” too is a bit strange. I think it’s ok to make an exception for loan words because there we’re using the _original language’s vowels_ (naïve isn’t pronounced “nah-I’ve” after all).
Speaking of acronyms, I read about a computer professor who was accused by a stranger of knowing nothing because because he said S-E-O instead of see-oh. We need those dots!
@@judithstrachan9399 interesting, not sure I’ve ever heard that version but it does sound similar in quick conversation so maybe it just escaped my ear
@@judithstrachan9399 oo, that’s a fun anecdote to explain why the distinction matters! I expect the professor had a good laugh about that conversation afterwards
As a typeface nerd, I really appreciate your use of Strenuous Black! As a native Spanish speaker, I'm absolutely in favor of using diacritical marks. Love these suggestions!
For people who learn English as a second language, English NEEDS something to clarify the pronunciation. Therefore using diacritics seems a good option (especially for non-native speakers) to learn English. By only reading and writing it, it is insufficient to learn English. This is because non-native speakers don't have enough and precise information coming from the written part. Years ago, before the cable TV and internet, the written part was the only option for many (only books). If nobody talks English around you, you are lost, unsure on how to pronounce some words. Rob's example: "Present vs present vs present vs present" is a good example, as I saw my friends struggling to pronounce those words. The way to learn English was to create your own diacritics, (understand the meaning) and memorise the sound in a sentence if you have an English teacher that talks to you ( or, if you are lucky, by getting some good sound (with distorted image) from the cable TV with CNN news during the 90's). To read the phonetics in the dictionary was another option to learn but usually people don't know the international phonetic alphabet (IPA). Diacritics should be compulsory to learn and optional to use. Maybe the Shavian alphabet needs to be taught, but nobody around us knew about that, not even its existence. Diacritics should be compulsory learned but optional to use. Spanish: Me parece fabuloso el uso de diacríticos, siempre y cuando sea opcional (no obligatorio), para ayudar a aprender y a pronunciar a los no nativos del idioma inglés desde el principio.
I wasn't aware of the tilde originating from a second 'n', and it makes so much sense now. Thank you for that ^^ It did remind me of the å in nordic languages, where the ring also started as the second 'a' (in aa) that moved above the first one and ultimately was simplified to a circle. Now I wonder if there are even more diacritics that originate from doubled letters...
Not a double letter, but the two dots in German Ä, Ö and Ü started out as an E written above those vowel letters. In old handwriting (Kurrent), the lowercase e looked a bit like a mirrored N, of which the outer, downward lines were emphasised much more when written with a quill. When stuck on top of another letter, it would eventually degrade into two short lines or dots. That’s also the reason why to this day, ö can be replaced by oe etc. if for some reason the proper letter isn’t available.
@@BrayanAbelino I don’t think the E is closely related to the pronunciation. In standard pronunciation, ö sounds like /ø/ or /œ/, ü sounds like /y/ or /Y/, with long vowels being more open, whereas ä doesn’t have its own sound, but sounds like open /e/ (as in English let, men)
Not a double letter, but ancient Greek has the iota subscript, a tiny iota ("ι") written underneath a vowel to indicate where one originally was after it; over time pronunciation changed and the iotas became silent, but were still retained in spelling as subscripts. According to Wikipedia it still shows up in a few rare instances today.
Just a little tidbit - when we talk about long and short vowels in English, we are really talking about two different vowel sounds. In Classical Latin, Ancient Greek, and indeed Old English, long and short vowels were exactly that - long and short versions of the same sound, and macrons were used to differentiate when a vowel was held longer. Since Modern English doesn't have phonemic vowel length, it is hard for native speakers of English to hear the difference between long and short vowels. The reason why we use the term "long and short" to describe two different vowel sounds is because these terms are vestigial from when English actually did have long and short vowels. Now, there is certainly nothing wrong with using a macron to differentiate between two different vowel sounds, especially since both these sounds are already represented by the same letter, but they are not "long" and short" as they are so often called.
I'd say the "long vowels" are diphtongs: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphthong. It always baffles me that a language that has such an abundance of diphtongs in pronunciation, seems to have no way of spelling these.
In Portuguese, we use the tilda only in vowels. And the tilda in vowels creates a nasal sound for the vowels A (for example, in the word PÃO - bread) and O (for example, in the word CORAÇÕES - hearts). Yes, we have other nasal vowels, usually those before M or N, as in the word MUITO, which is spoken as MUINTO. The nasal sound in N is present in Portuguese with the addition of an h in front of the consonant that should be nasal, as in GALINHA (chicken).
Hey Rob, now we really need to hear you recite "Chaos" by Trenité (this one poem about English pronunciation). Maybe even with those additional accents to make sense of it? Or explaining on a few examples in the poem why words are pronounced the way they are. I'd love it!
As much as I personally love this idea, as someone who proofreads, it would be double work for us to decipher words that people also frequently mispronounce. (Nucular, Chipolte, etc.)
I created a system similar to this for my school work... didn't last very long because i didn't record it and I kept changing it. Also, it's a surprising amount of extra effort to write diacritics.
If you switch your keyboard to US (International) it will be relatively trivial to add some of those diacritics to your letters. Combine " ' ` ~ or ^ with a fitting letter and it'll type it öút lìkê so. Though that doesn't include the proposed schwa dot or the emphasis things.
3:50 that was probably the smoothest and most professional segue to an interior shot due to technical difficulty that I have ever seen. Wow! Well done.
Rob's annoyance at those blasted showoff scholars putting silent letters in words is the most validating thing. I too seethe whenever I see a b in a word that has no business having a b.
From an essay on reforming English spelling, attributed to M.J. Yilz, in a letter he wrote to the journal The Economist: For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld. I think this is a brilliant suggestion! :)
I notice he's mostly avoiding words like "come", "sum", and "up"! In the end he opts for an Italian rather than an English definition of long and short vowels, but the letter u (and sometimes o) has at least three different sounds, one of them (the most common) being more like a short German a than a u. Also, he plainly has a strong upper-class English accent! "Hev" for "have"? It should be phonemic, like Shavian, not phonetic.
It would be very annoying to type, but I can see this being very useful in textbooks. Like how Chinese has Pinyin to help people learn how to pronounce the words.
I grew up in Kansas; in our school, we used the macron and the breve over vowels to signify the long vowel and the short vowel, respectively. It was a spelling and pronunciation-learning technique.
The nice thing is it would be relatively easy for software to do automatically as we type (or to apply to existing texts). After all, the software watching over our typing already understands the gramma of each sentence and so could usually distinguish which variant of a homograph was in play.
In Irish we use accents (fada) and they make a huge difference and are really useful. For example sean is the Irish for old (pronounced shan) and Seán which means Jean/John/Jack and is pronounced shawn, then there’s orla which is vomit and Órla which is a girl’s name and means golden princess. There are many more such as lon a blackbird and lón which is lunch. The fada elongates the vowel and changes the word. We also have a dot over the letter g, today this is mainly represented as an h, this give lots of meanings such as possession. It sounds complicated but it’s very rule based and once you learn it you can pronounce just about any word. We don’t need double vowels or silent letters: oo is ú, ee is í, for example. Learning a foreign language is essential. Learning castellano has improved my Gaeilge (Irish) and inglés. When you pronounce the grave as grave as in terrible or a place to bury a body it sounds strange, I thought it was gráwve.
I saw "found" and "wound" in your list of words that aren't pronounced the same, and thought "but they are!" Then I realized you were talking about "wound" as an injury, not "wound" as the past tense of "wind".
I like accents on words. But if typing it can be more challenging to use letters with symbols in English programs. In Scots Gaelic we use a grave over vowels to elongate or broaden their sound. I enjoy the distinction because the non grave spelling can mean something totally different to the one with the grave. I'd love to see a video on IPA if you don't have it already. Great video! And it would make it easier for people learning English. I alao love the thing about the "ch" and "sh". I'm definitely going to use it in note taking!
The Gaelic grave sounds like it functions like the tohutō (macron) in te reo Māori. It also represents an elongated vowel, and completely changes the meaning. I was livid when I discovered years ago that a major British newspaper house style required the omission of tohutō and similar marks, because it meant that they were deliberately misspelling people's names, which is something I'm sure that they would never have done to English names. I hope they have become more enlightened since then.
In elementary school (in the greater Chicago area), I had a teacher who used the macron to mark the (any) long vowel sound and the breve for any short vowel sound. Apparently this was tied to helping us determine whether a syllable ended at the vowel or at the consonant. Syllables that end with a vowel were supposed to have the vowel pronounced long, but ending in a consonant required the short vowel sound. That always seemed rather circular to me because you had to already know the pronunciation.
I was going to make the same comment. I went to school in the Midwest in 19. Well, never mind…. When learning to read we had a lot of worksheets doing what you mentioned above. I don’t recall if the marks were present when my children were learning to read in the early 2000’s.
Dictionaries do the same thing, if not in the first occurrence of a word, then in parentheses to show pronunciation, if they don’t use the IPA (which ought to be called the IFA).
Something I like about the overall visual language of english is the LACK of seperate marks. One thing about accent marks is that I fond them a bit of a pain to write over time. especially when I am writing cursive and doting i’s and t’s is already an extra step. And even outside of cursive, in print, its nice to write a single character with a single stroke, which is something I do like about english. maybe instead of seperate accents, we try those tail things that some languages use that are connected to the modified letter so you dont have to raise your hand an extra time.
Yes, english is fun when you get the hang of it. But reading a lot can help you learn to guess your way around. I don't know how I could have coped with the intricasies of the English llanguage without reading a lot (oh yes, and old books, like Dickens and Jane Austen). English is better in the end without all those accents.
Accented letters are also letters, they occupy a place in the alphabet, and on keyboards. If they are difficult to use only with a keyboard combination, they do not make writing easier, but make it more difficult and slower.
I like the idea of c being initially eliminated, in favour of k and s. It’s redundant. Once people get used to that it can return to a ch sound, eliminating the h
Kia Ora from New Zealand. I love this, as I'm involved with helping refugees from non-English speaking countries, & I know how daunting learning our language is to them. Saw, saw, soar, sore??? Sight, site, cite; honesty, hone, honour; quay, key etc... I was taught by Irish Catholic nuns (!!!) Back in the '60s, & my children think I'm hilarious pronouncing what, when, white, which etc the way I do (I'm certain one of those delightful ladies might haunt me if I didn't!), so I enjoyed this post very much, thank you!
As a native English speaker, sometimes I'm glad I was able to easily grasp learning the language as a child, and sometimes I absolutely loathe how unnecessarily confusing and arbitrary its rules are for second language learners lol. Having learned other languages, I just wish English was more... consistent.🙃
I know what you mean. I love our English language, it can be so much fun. Sentences like 'can you see the ewe under the yew tree,' or 'the mayor on the mare rode down the road' and 'it's beyond the pale to put the pale pail on the pale' are just three ways to confuse someone learning English as another language (and yes I have😄, they loved it). I have a list of homophones that I've complied, I know I can find complete lists but hey I wanted to make my own. It's fun that we can have one sound and three or four ways to spell it. Not to mention the same spellings with different sounds. Yep I love our language, even if it is downright crazy. I lived for a while in a country that used the Cyrillic alphabet, what you saw was what you said, where the accents went was a whole different ball game.
I too learned some french and german at school. Now i speak fluent Norwegian, where we have three extra vowels, Å is very like the dipthong in boat, indee boat is written båt and pronunced almost the same. Æ is a very useful way of knowing which a sound one should use, pronounciation can be a little tricky my wife often laughs wheni suggest we go picking berries, and asks why we would want to go to the pub now. The third extra vowel Ø is often transliterated as oe there is some similarity with the written dipthong in old fashioned Oesophagous, but as is often the case the correct pronounciation in Norwegian is These extra letters could help. Thanks Rob
This is ȧ very nīcĕ systėm. The ōnly point of cȯntentiȯn Ī havĕ is that Ī think it's ȧ littlĕ cȯnfūsing to ȧpply the homȯgraph marker to ȧ homȯnym, sincĕ that mākĕs mē expect ȧ phȯnetic diffėrencĕ that just isn't therĕ. The big thing Ī līkĕ ȧbout this is that, unlīkĕ ȧ spelling reform, this one can ȧccommȯdatĕ diffėrent accents and diälects. Which not ōnly mākĕs it usȧblĕ by all pēŏplĕ, but also mākĕs it easier to wrītĕ eye diälects.
It's an AWFUL system. If you think it's great, go ahead and use it. I'd love to see you spend 30 minutes writing the same comment with the suggested system.
@@encycl07pedia- It would be the same in any other system. It becomes muscle memory much like speaking and reading are drilled into you by years of practicing it in school. There would also be a way to type them easier like other languages have. It woul̆d bē thė sāme in any other systėm. It bêcȯmes mu̇sc̆le me̱mōry mu̇ch līke speaking and reading are drilled into you by years ȯf pra̱cticing it in schōōl. There woul̆d ȧlsō bè ȧ wāy̆ to type them e̱a̱siër líke ȯthėr lā̱nguages have.
@@o_sch There are actual limitations to the number of keys that are even remotely comfortable/efficient to type. In order to add so many variants (essentially separate characters) it would come close to doubling (if not more) the current 26/52 English standard. That inclusion of excess characters leads to slowdowns in cognition and response in order to make sure you're using the right letter, writing or typing. Even Russians with their 33-character Cyrillic alphabet largely ignore ё in favor of е. "Easier" is easier than "e̱a̱siër" no matter how used to typing the latter you are. Modifier+A is always going to be more difficult and slower to type than A.
@@WaddleQwacker They can't type as quickly or comfortably, definitely. The accents require a prefix key combo like Ctrl+'. Don't even get me started on on-screen keyboards on tablets/phones that require long presses. The default Russian keyboard is not optimal with the placement of so many common characters in the vertical center (еитр) requiring leaving home row. English QWERTY isn't optimal, either, which is partially why I use Dvorak. Most people don't think about how inefficient they are most of the time. I do. -Taking a shower and brushing your teeth at the same time. -Arranging your grocery list to limit backtracking. -Keyboard navigation over cursor navigation and using keyboard keys like PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End. -Tiling window managers. These are all things "normal" people won't do/use regardless of it giving them something you can't get back: time. This video proposes just totally effing over anyone who wants to write or type English by putting all sorts of distinct marks all over every word. Why get things done quickly when you can do the same task 5x slower?
Love it. I have family brought up in France and they just cannot comprehend how we, for example, pronounce "Leicester". I spoke to a French nephew and he had to correct me by telling me Leicester was really Le-sester-shire. 😄😄
The genius thing about incorporating diacritics is that it would be far easier and cheaper to implement than a spelling reform. You would only need to paint on accents rather than replacing entire signs.
i already knew that the macron is often used for elongated vowels in other languages mainly because of how people romanise japanese. in japanese, specifically when writing in hiragana, you can add an う after any character ending in an "u" or "o" sound to elongate it (eg ありがとう) and likewise you can also add an い after any character ending in an "i", or "e" sound for the same effect (eg せんせい) and an あ after any character ending in an "a" sound to elongate it too (eg おばあさん), whereas in katakana you just add a dash (eg テレキャスター), and when romanising japanese, macrons are often used for that. take the word 吸血鬼 (きゅうけつき, the japanese word for vampire, kanji literally translates to "blood-sucking demon") for example. when romanising that word, you can romanise it as "kyuuketsuki" or as "kyūketsuki" (depending on the limitations you're working with and personal preference ig)
Yes, I agree, if you confine it to that use. The problem with English, the long vowels aren't really longer versions of the short vowels like in Japanese. For example in kit and kite, short i is so much different than long i. They don't seem related. kite should probably be spelled as kaite with two dots over the i, but then he said don't change the spelling of the words we already have.
@@Tiqerboy next step,we could get ride of the e on the end those word Or not It's ā way to māk this work somtīms. sē, sāvs on confūsion with prēfixes and suffixes.
I just want to say it again so you don't miss your great achievement: Great pronunciation on the een there! [I'm not going to bother putting in the distinction. I hardly ever make the distinction, no acception today!] The een can be a bit better. It currently sounds a smidge like some foreign word, you need to make it sound like uhn instead of un. It's basically a word made from schwa's. But the second een was quite literally perfect! Pat yourself on the back for that one! I've never heard a foreigner pronounce a Dutch word so much like a native before!
10:44 the acute accent marker also often changes the sound of the vowel -- if not in Spanish, at least in Portuguese it does. In Portuguese, the "é" in "café" sounds a little bit like "e" in "red" rather than what the pure letter "e" usually sounds like, as in the first half of "a" in "say", i.e. without the transition to "i" or "ee".
I had a really hard time learning how to read growing up and one of my teachers had a system like this to teach kids how to read. I feel so lucky every day that I was put in her class because it was life changing.
YES!!!😃😃 Exactly!!👏👏👏 I had thought about that myself-some years back. At least by doing so, it would return English to its-more Germanic origin. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this tutorial. 🙂
eww no, please don't try to make english more germanic now. (actually I've sometimes thought it would be brilliant to scrub german through a period of being spoken (badly?) by the vikings, danes, normans, celts, etc in order to erode/minimize all the declensions, cases, grammatical genders, and other grammatical features) 🤪
Plenty of diacritics in my native language, mostly (not exclusively) used to palatalise consonants or indicate vowel quantity. I enjoy these little thought experiments and am so glad that someone has the time on their hands to devote to them and present (underscore e) us with the results. Thank you! Oh and by the way, I also instantly flinched when you talked about 'schwa is never stressed', make way for Dr. Geoff!
Other people have used similar systems before including McGuffey and Webster in their early dictionaries. People have also created software (that can apply such formatting automatically). I wrote an extension that allows one to surf the net with diacritic assistance but I cant share it in the comments. No self-promotion :(. Other people like @DavidMorganEd have done similar work - his work is able to cater for regional accents (very nice!)
Enlightening and entertaining as always -- and further reminders of why I'm grateful to be a native speaker and not to be learning English as a second language!
Funny enough, many people who speak French as a first language still get confused between words like “la” and “là”, even though there’s an accent to differentiate them... With sentences as context, everyone understands the actual meanings of the different homophones. However, once it’s time to write, a lot of people put accents where there shouldn’t be, and no accents where there should be 😭
I'm not the least bit surprised, to be honest. French has a certain... capriciousness of spelling that makes English spelling almost look sensible. Honestly, I'd go as far as to say that some of English's bad spelling habits, in particular, silent letters and random doubled letters, are inherited from French, since the words you see them in tend to be of French origen, and with the corresponding French words spelled almost the same. But the accents are the worst. For instance, why do we have a single é at the end of "hilarité", when most words with that sound are spelled with "ée", as in "épée"? Why do accented letters make different sounds in different parts of a word? For example, in "évêque", the "é" and the "ê" make the same sound, but in "cérémonie", the two "é"s make different sounds. And let's not even get into the occasional instance of *silent* accented letters, where the accent apparently just serves to make a different letter NOT silent because heaven forbid we put an accent mark over a consonant.
@@docteurcuicui582 Hmm. I've always heard évêque with the é pronounced similar to the English short E sound, so sounding like the ê, although as spelled you would expect it to be closer to the English long A sound. Cérémonie... I hear it as cèrémonie to be honest, but maybe the stress pattern is confusing my perception; compare it to, for instance, vénérable. And yes, I have been to France. 4 times in fact, totaling almost 6 months.
I'm currently studying A-Level English Language and you're very insightful! I would argue though that there is some issue with including accents that teach pronounciation because, as you mentioned, people with different accents pronunce words differently, and the implication that "x way of speaking is correct/standard" is *very* controversial
Bro, there are correct, standard ways of pronunciation. Anything other than that is wrong. Now, as long as people can understand you, it's not a bad thing, but it's still true. Whenever I speak a different language, I try to pronounce words in the standard way. For Dutch that's Standaardnederlands, for German, that's Hochdeutsch, and for English, that's received pronunciation.
17:10 In Portuguese we used to have this accent. The word 'quem' merges the u and e together, while in "pingüim" the u and i are separate. For some silly reason it was decided we wouldn't use it anymore. Wish it could come back 😢
I was thrilled that diaeresis made an appearance along with The New Yorker magazine, including a glimpse of the very (amusing) article that introduced me to this diacritic! Well done!
Watching that, I recalled at school in the English Midlands we had a Geordie teacher, unlike everyone else there, he pronounced books like bukes. Strangely, a pupil had the surname Tookinson, which we pronounced Tuke-inson but he pronounced the start to rhyme with our book pronounciation.
“You can underline it too” This is a problem because you can’t use paste-and-match-style. Or imagine you’re using it in a blog and the content needs to be styled differently? You’d have to either use inline styling, which is a bad practice, or assume that the tag (underline) actually has the text decoration set in css that you expect. It’s a slippery slope. Best keep your styling and unicode separate.
Excellent explanation why accents are valuable. Learning a second language myself, as an only English speaker, I was ignoring the accents in my new language. This led to confusion in understanding for the people who were listening to me. I now force myself to use the accents and the difference this makes is palpable. Thank you for offering this insight into how accents would make English easier to read and understand.
It is a very interesting video. I actually never thought about adding more signs to English letters because i already remembered how to read the words. This may help new learners 👍
Wow, I thought it would be tough to make english worse than it is... I think adding the complexity of accents would do it. In fact, I feel profoundly grateful for their relative absence. Having struggled with the challenge of typing french accents using an overstrike, figuring out a french keyboard, and misreading poorly formed letters or spelling mistakes; I'm not at all sure accents would improve anything. Given the wide variety of pronunciation due to spoken accents, my imagination is pained at the thought of trying to figure out proper use of written accents on words, or reading . Currently I count on written words to help clarify when spoken accents create variation that is difficult to understand. I think the proposed written accents would add the same type of variation and challenge to comprehension and learning. I guess we would have to put an accent grave on either the verbal or written accent to distinguish them. I would be open to dropping offending randomly added silent consonants that make the language unfriendly (like the g in foreign, gh in neighbour) and maybe adding a few more vowels with the hope of a shift to more consistency.
It would never last. People are always changing things. Look how many people now say flammable instead of inflammable. There's also snuck instead of sneaked, turning a regular verb into an irregular one.
Yes, actually watching this video I came more and more to the conclusion that it is all tongue in cheek (due to the dialects and variations in pronounciation), but most commenters seem to take it all seriously. English would be unrecognizable if all these accents were implemented, and guessing / inferring meaning and pronounciation would disappear. English would not be fun anymore. Who would order and which changes. This would take years and years (like it took for Portuguese and the language Academy official changes). Pandemonium would break out if this were tried for the English language.
For me, as a non-native english speaker, I think it is easier to simply learn the different spellings and differentiate the meanings according to the context, than learn the use of that many additional accent signs. These are one reason I do not like french an spanish (I always did those wrong at school...) and I am glad that german does not have those (öüä are basically optional). I think the current lack of these accent signs is actually an advantage of english. Especially nowadays when we type most of the day on a keyboard, adding all these accent signs would slow down drasticaly.
the umlauts in German are absolutely not optional. Not in the ä=a sense (plain wrong, always), nor even in the ä=ae sense (technically ok, but it's a pain to read and you'll look technologically clueless, too.)
I have to agree with ahG7na4, Umlaute in German are definitely not optional. Especially when you're in school and write ä, ö, ü as ae, oe, ue they would be simply plain wrong. Not the Umlaute are optional, the spelling vowel+e is optional or rather an alternative when you have to write with an alphabet that does not have Umlaute, for example on non-German keyboards, programming languages etc. mostly in the past. Some words, usually names, may be written with ae, oe, ue for historical reasons as well.
Native Spanish speaker here. You can't learn how to pronounce English words according to context. All of them are individual and there are no rules for it, and when there are, there's a 99% of the time that there's a big amount of exceptions. And I haven't learned German or French but I'm pretty sure those are not optional... But I think people like @ahG7na4 will explain it better. Buuuut, in Spanish? A difficult time? Let's see... In Spanish we only have 2! "áéíóú" for syllable stress (Doesn't change anything, just represents where the stress is) and "ü" for words with "gui" or "gue" that you want to pronounce the "u" too like "Pingüino" or "Antigüedad". But are they Hard to learn right? I mean, those look like complicate- Esdrujula's and oversdrujulas (Stress in the first syllable when they have 3 or more syllables" Always have stress diacritics. "N", "S", or vowel in plain words? Stress diacritic (Always). No "N", "S" or vowel in acute words? Stress diacritic (Always). And of course words with only 1 syllable never have them except homonym words where we differentiate them with syllable stress diacritics. "güi" and "güe" are so rare to find and easy to learn that is hard to even tell if I've ever seen someone struggle with it. Now you may ask... What about if someone doesn't know where the syllable stress is? Well, Spanish speakers have an... Interesting way to "Guess" it. That is calling the word as if they were running out but we want to stop them like: "¡Camiiiiiiino!" And we are like "Ok, it's plain". I know this doesn't always work and it's subjective but... It works most of the time and if you have enough input you'll never have a problem with it.
@@m4rloncha You might not be able to learn English pronunciation from context, but part of the topic of the video is (as shown by the example of "present") that it might be easy to differentiate between those words when somebody pronounces them (to know the word has different meanings you had to learn them some time before, so you might know the pronunciation as well) - but the acoustic difference gets lost when they are written down. And when you are communicating in written form, you don't even need pronunciation if you are never going to talk to someone. But still you need to know which meaning a word has - and that's where context comes into play, which usually makes diacritics like shown in the video redundant. And when I know a different meaning also has a different pronunciation, then I can also read a text aloud quite fluently because the context tells me how I have to pronounce it.
@@gordonbrinkmann Hello Gordon, In Spanish and I think most languages too there are ways to differentiate homonym words and sometimes there are not. In the present one we can easily see the first ones why they would not be necessary since they are clearly used in different contexts while they are both nouns. But the others? One has a different syllable stress and the other a different sound! Of course we need to differentiate those at least by a different spelling on them. But if the challenge is not changing It, then the use of diacritical marks will be necessary. And btw... Words weren't just meant to be "Read", but also spoken. That is, books, presentations, the law, etc... So yes, making the reader an easier space is something important to do. But there's a problem... The reader gets an easier work, but the writer doesn't. In this cases my personal take is to make the Writer and Reader's work easier at the same time. Of course one of them will have more difficulties, but that will always happen. For example everything said in the video could be better or not, but have they think about actually making a keyboard layout with It that makes the writer's work easier or they will instead make a mess of keyboard's combinations just for a diacritical mark? Have they thought that maybe some diacritical marks are just hard to see on long distances or look pretty similar to each other and that can also confuse people? If you decide one option or the other is something subjective, and you always have to be careful since we're working with a international used language.
