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&UA-cam&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 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.
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.
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: UA-cam 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 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 UA-cam) is another example, where the convention is applied for one meaning but not for the other.
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.
Your "present" example made me think of a colleague I had, many years ago. There was a miscommunication in the office: due to finicky server reliability in those days, the boss failed to receive get an important piece of correspondence. She then wrote my co-worker a rather terse request for it. My colleague replied with the opening line: "I resent your email." This was intended as: "I sent your email again," but was taken as: "I take umbrage at your email." Needless to say, the initial reaction did nothing to ease an already-tense day. Luckily, they were some good-natured folks at heart, and the chuckle we got when the matter was clarified helped immensely. PS: There was also the time this same office decided to wish our Spanish-speaking employees a "Happy New Year," and left the tilde off the "ñ" - but that's a story for another time.
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: 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.
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.
Rob, I can't thank you enough for your videos. Language is something that interests me on a level I cannot even say - While I'm not fluent-conversational in Spanish or Swedish, I can watch videos in either language and understand about 90% of what's being said. I appreciate your work and analsyses on so many language issues. Carry on, please.
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...
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
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.
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. 😊
@@CoreRealm The Roman alphabet, commonly associated with Latin, was not originally crafted with that language in mind. Its roots lie in earlier writing systems, particularly the Etruscan and Greek alphabets. These systems were adapted over time, and the Romans inherited and modified them to suit their needs. The Etruscans used the alphabet for their own language, which bore little resemblance to Latin. Their writing system was itself influenced by Greek scripts brought to the Italian peninsula by traders and settlers. When the Romans encountered the Etruscan alphabet, they adopted it, retaining some letters and discarding others. The letters they chose to keep were not always a perfect match for Latin sounds.
@@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?
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.
@@LordBokito 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.
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.
Randomly found your channel and I love it! I've watched a few videos now, we should all be interested in where our words come from and you present really well. Accents would definitely make English easier for new speakers
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'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.
This is great! In another video you asked what we thought English was missing or should have and I said "diacritics!" I didn't know you had already done this video!
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 ;-)
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.
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.
Native portuguese speaker too, Mozambique Can you elaborate on how EU and BR are always disagreeing on spelling and accents. I thought it was clear that brazillian portuguese was a bit different than european, why discuss or disagree?😂. Plus the language is from protugal howcome they want to argue about it😭 Sei lá não faz muito sentido
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 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!
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.
Thank you for mentioning Turkish! Just a small correction: the letter “ğ” is a bit different from how you explained it. You can’t compare it to the silent “k” in “knife” or the “p” in “psalm” because in Turkish, the soft “ğ” stretches and softens the preceding vowel rather than being silent. For example, in the word “ağlamak” (to cry), it’s pronounced like “aːɫɑmɑk,” where the “a” sound is lengthened and kind of pronounced as “ay”. In “knife,” on the other hand, the “k” is completely silent.
K is completely silent but the following n is crisper : !nife, !nock, !nit !night. gh is also completely silent but the preceding vowel is not only long but thicker in the mouth Sight is thicker than site.
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.
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.
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!
I love this so much, though I must point out that (I believe, correct me if I'm wrong) there are actually 5 total versions of the word "present." AKA all the more reason we need a system like this! I'm leaving out the dot cause my phone can't put it lol buuut... present: gift, prèsent: now (time), presēnt: to give/show, prēsent: to send before, AND present: here (physically in a certain place).
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!
@@marcdragon2936 Good day, I do hope this message finds you in the most splendid of times! As English is but my third linguistic endeavor, I find myself occasionally at odds with its intricate nuances and delicate turns of phrase. Might I be so bold as to inquire whether you would be so kind as to impart upon me a few pearls of wisdom to aid in my humble quest for eloquence and mastery of this most esteemed tongue?
@@garrynewman6211 Good day to you as well, friend! As English is a language in which I've studied, particularly in relation to education, I am fully comprehensive of your struggle with its intricacies- Fuck this. I hate writing formal English. When I write, I always write like I'm scripting a video. It's kind of how I learned to write. I used to tell my students that they didn't have to write super formally, or have a lot of words. I would usually grade essays and shit based on how well they got their point across. Or if it was an educational essay, it was how well they understood it and explained it in a way that was interesting.
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?"😂
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.)
Hey there, I got to say: This video is awesome! All the information, and the editing style… it‘s great! I also agree to your statements, like with the breve, and over dot… So overall thanks for this video!
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 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.
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!
Hi , I just discovered your channel , it's one of the most interesting video I have seen about languages : for once you don't blame people who try to learn a foreign language but try to decipher why they could be confuse sometimes , it's very nice . Being french myself , I am very disappointed at myself regarding my accent : I wish a software , an app will use your method to help people to improve their skills For the anectode ( I learned that very recently ) : the letter ù exists only for the word ù in french.
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).
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.
Just learned from this channel, I'm hooked, the guy is amazingly smart, and the subjects are super interesting. Love learning about languages. Cheers from South America.
20:30 missed opportunity to write your local newspapers, thank the new Yorker for its dedication, and also send letters to dictionaries and associations.
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.
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".
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!
Dhis iz mi propózal for an Inglish spelling Refórm: a vejtabel iz a plaant or part ov a plaant dhat iz eeten az food. Potátoez, beenz and unnyonz ar aul vejtabelz.
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.
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’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
Nice proposal, definitely worth trying. As a Spaniard speaking also English French Italian and in process of learning German I tell you accents are both helpful and cumbersome but help understand pronunciation much faster and help aloud double senses
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?
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!
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 👍
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.
Dhis iz mi propózal for an Inglish spelling Refórm: a vejtabel iz a plaant or part ov a plaant dhat iz eeten az food. Potátoez, beenz and unnyonz ar aul vejtabelz.
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.
Hi, Rob! Been following you for a long time and for me this was the most fascinating video you've presented so far, I think the inclusion of these diacritics would make things much easier. My only problem is that at 92 plus years of age, it will take me some time to remember them. 🙂
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 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.
To be fair, some accents use the schwa sound a lot less. I'm Glaswegian, in that example sentence at 5:05, I only use the "uh" sound twice in the O in brother & the U in purple. The E, A, PL & I are actually pronounced. It's also why we struggle to say the phrase "purple burglar alarm" here, the three A's in a row conflicts with each other in such a way that makes it difficult to say where a more Standard English accent would use the "uh" sound for the A in burglar.
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!
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.
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 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.
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.)
Wow! I am so happy to have found you on youtube. I just subscribed and watched 3 videos so far (to date) lol Anyway, i agree completely with you on adding diacritical marks for clarity. I teach reading by Phonics and also some sight words that can't be explained phonetically. Diacritical marks work do get the job done faster! The kids grasp them and use them to decode words that they are unfamiliar with. I love your idea and wish it would be taught her in America. I use them all of the time in my Phonics program called the The 44 Sounds Method/Game. Thanks for your channel. I also agree to learn at least one other language and I will be using the Pimsleur method for Spanish. Thanks for your videos and i look forward to viewing more after today.
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) 🤪
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
@@thatothertedaren’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.
We should start using these, or at least some of them... For years I have proposed using the macron to differentiate between short and long vowels, and that was really pleasantly surprising seeing you suggest that in this video... The other diacritics were interesting to see as well! The only thing that was different was I had thought of using the macron only in situations where words are spelled the same but have a different vowel sound, such as "wind" and "wīnd", or "bass" and "bāss", "lead" or "lēad", etc, etc.... That could be a simple step towards the more comprehensive revisions you mentioned 🤷
I think the breve is a great idea for English classes when learning new vocabulary (and for ESOL learners in general), and maybe on official public signage, but I can't imagine myself bothering to write them in any other context. I'd frankly rather just drop those letters than start adding extra strokes to indicate they're silent. I think the schwa symbol would be tricky, because sometimes words that are typically pronounced with a schwa can change to another sound in certain contexts, particularly when an unstressed syllable becomes emphasized, like "He was THEE (the) greatest of all time" or "I could give you AY (a) dollar, but definitely not five." And then do you remove the schwa overdot and consider them separate words even though the only change is the emphasis? That and the confusion over different accents (which I know you brought up) makes this kind of a no-go for me. How does the macron below interact with underlining? It feels like it would get in the way. I don't see why we wouldn't just put it on the top of the letter. I think it would look tidier that way anyway. Even if it's more symbols in the same general area, it's organized and consistent. Having just one symbol that lives underneath feels random and chaotic to me. If we had cedillas to give them company, I might feel differently. I like the diaeresis, but I don't know how often it would come up, and googling English words that could use it was a challenge for me. I could only find the co- and re- prefix examples you gave here, in which case I think a hyphen works just fine. I don't mind the grave to distinguish words, but I would only use them for very common words that are both pronounced and spelled exactly the same, like the foreign language examples you give. La/là (the/there) and ou/où (or/where) are all extremely common words (you could argue they're fundamental, even - words you might use several times a day), and I think that's what makes the diacritic worthwhile. I don't see the point for the English examples you gave. If then/than or are/our were spelled the same, they would be great candidates for that diacritic, as basic building block words of English, but they aren't. The best examples I can think of that might be worth it in my mind are right/right (correct vs not left), too/too (also vs. excessively), and maybe one/one (if you want to distinguish either person from object, or noun from adjective). That said, they don't seem easy to confuse in context.
I discovered this channel by accident and I am hooked. I find it so refreshing that someone wants to improve our understanding of the English language rather than dumb it down with the use of emojis and text slang.
English indeed needs it. It's to make reading easier for a learner. We have a similar case in my mother tongue, Tyap, in central Nigeria, where there are different intonations but just the acute accent is used for writing to denote plural nouns having the same spellings with their singular counterparts and for differentiating certain words with the same spelling but different meanings. I think we need more accents rather than just one. The main goal is ease in understanding the written language for the learner. Thanks for this lesson, Sir.
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.
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.
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&UA-cam&Influencer..Jan-2024..TATAM..newyearspromo&bclid={{creator_id}}
Rob, I bet you could create a new language and do videos teaching us this new language
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.
Doesn't modern English have a couple of umlauts? Like 'naïve', etc.
I just wonder how do we write bird with a dot. Do we put a dot over the dot or leave it like this?
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.”
Uh oh. But I bet an attack from him is charming.
@@RobWords But even you put a dot on the stressed "o" in "brother", Rob!
Hercules might too...
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.
@@SantiagoLopez-fq4ebwell that's just it. That's not even a schwa, it's a strut-vowel. In fact, it is in most dialects.
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
Not just for people learning English but for native speakers as well. I'm thinking about Margerie Taylor Green's pronunciation of "indicted". 😅
@@brightsideofmaths learning a language is something temporal and personal, having to write down spelling is permanent and universal.
@@rafaelmijares369 spelling doesn't matter in that case. You still understand she said indicted. There are wackier spellings in other english dialects.
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).
Sim seriauma boa ideia, igual o bopomofo é usado no mandarim taiwanês
Japan has a similiar thing for children learning one of the version of Japanese. I forget which it is.
@@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.
@@DCMAKER133when you write hiragana spellings over kanji, it's called Furigana
That’s geniüs and simple enough to apply! Very entertaining, thanks
Genyus.
Geni-us
Vats jinyoos end simpol inuf too aplay! Very enterteyning tenyks!
gènius
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 hated so much when I had to separate syllables in 7th grade beacuse of this (1st language is Spanish).
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: UA-cam 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 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).
n8ce
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)
"grass" for US English. It's part of the trap-bath split, so "fâther" is a more widely-recognizable example.
^ (Pronunciation is up)
_ (keep the tone the same)
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 UA-cam) is another example, where the convention is applied for one meaning but not for the other.
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.
Dog lead/lead (Pb)
🇹🇭
These are called heteronyms and they always bedevil those learning English, even as a first language.
Your "present" example made me think of a colleague I had, many years ago. There was a miscommunication in the office: due to finicky server reliability in those days, the boss failed to receive get an important piece of correspondence. She then wrote my co-worker a rather terse request for it. My colleague replied with the opening line: "I resent your email."
This was intended as: "I sent your email again," but was taken as: "I take umbrage at your email." Needless to say, the initial reaction did nothing to ease an already-tense day. Luckily, they were some good-natured folks at heart, and the chuckle we got when the matter was clarified helped immensely.
PS: There was also the time this same office decided to wish our Spanish-speaking employees a "Happy New Year," and left the tilde off the "ñ" - but that's a story for another time.
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.
Thank you for sharing your experience, sir 😙
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.
Exactly. This new proposed system reminds me of the Chinese sheng diao diacritics for Pinyin, and it definitely is easier for me to read English!
Mandarin and Cantonese speaker here, you are absolutely right. Indeed, English is harder.
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: 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.").
I didn't know that! Thanks
@@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.
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.
Canadian has 27 letters; Zed is followed by Eh.
/jk 😊
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.
Rob, I can't thank you enough for your videos. Language is something that interests me on a level I cannot even say - While I'm not fluent-conversational in Spanish or Swedish, I can watch videos in either language and understand about 90% of what's being said.
I appreciate your work and analsyses on so many language issues. Carry on, please.
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...
"Both of which I I'm sure I pronounced very badly." He said after perfectly pronouncing een (the number) like a native!
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
I always thought adding some vowels worked best but I probably could rethink that after this video.
Oh my god you again! Still a fan :)
I recently found your channel and I’m obsessed with it, you even helped me learn some German words that I never knew!
I wish English would bring back eth (ð) and thorn (þ). I am learning Icelandic and find these letters useful in distinguishing the two th sounds!
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!
@@alanbarnett718 Icelanders have no problems using these letters. I do agree about your first remark on "ye".
I am learning Icelandic too and found this very interesting.
Interesting to note that ð is completely silent in Faroese 🇫🇴
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.
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. 😊
W double-U can double for Weh & , just the same way the French use the vocalic digraph as in "douce" or "ouest" (west).
The Roman Alphabet isn’t rubbish, It’s just that it’s intended for its original language: Latin.
I disagree
@@SirReginaldBumquistIIIelaborate then
@@CoreRealm The Roman alphabet, commonly associated with Latin, was not originally crafted with that language in mind. Its roots lie in earlier writing systems, particularly the Etruscan and Greek alphabets. These systems were adapted over time, and the Romans inherited and modified them to suit their needs. The Etruscans used the alphabet for their own language, which bore little resemblance to Latin. Their writing system was itself influenced by Greek scripts brought to the Italian peninsula by traders and settlers. When the Romans encountered the Etruscan alphabet, they adopted it, retaining some letters and discarding others. The letters they chose to keep were not always a perfect match for Latin sounds.
Nothing at all wrong with the alphabet, the issue is in the English implementation; it's a mess.
There were other italic languages that used the “Roman” alphabet before Latin.
As a Dutch, I can say that you actually pronounced "een" and "één" really well👏🏼
Ugh nobody cares
@@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?
@@jojogirn6076 I care. You can leave now.
@@jojogirn6076
This is a language channel, who doesn't care?!
@@jojogirn6076you cared enough to comment that no one cares, use a damn common sense
In my fair opinion, English should absolutely go back to the roots and reïntroduce Ð ð and Þ þ.
Ðogecoin
Yes, I for some reason love the ( I couldn't find the letter )
@@ThatDutchAnimator Which one?
1. Ï ï
2. Ð ð
3. Þ þ
Agreed
Yesss a fellow diaeresis user!!! Respect!
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.
The Vietnamese took it a bit far though 😅 (at least how Vietnamese writing looks to me, without any knowledge of that languange)
@@LordBokito 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.
This wrīting systėm makes so much more sense than our cụrrėnt systėm. Bravo, sir.
You forgot the accent on the W to show it is silent.
@@loyellow1 My bad. There actually isn't an option to put that accent on w.
what is bravo? you mean brāvō?
@@durjam3734Ingglish needz a spelling refórm, wið fu dìacríttics but wið an òrþoggrafi much more fonéttic.
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.
Randomly found your channel and I love it! I've watched a few videos now, we should all be interested in where our words come from and you present really well. Accents would definitely make English easier for new speakers
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.
When your mic cut out, I thought it was my Bluetooth connection 😂
I did too! Turned my headphones on and off a couple times haha.
I was about to ask if anyone else had this problem😂
same
REAL
I'm on my laptop and thought my corded earbuds finally cut out.
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!
İnanmıyorum.
Alex ne knk o zaman
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.
@@Kabukkafa abi full ismimi niye kullaniyim hiç nick diye bişi duydun mu
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.
This is great! In another video you asked what we thought English was missing or should have and I said "diacritics!" I didn't know you had already done this video!
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 😄
We have a town in England called Reading which I suppose is differentiated by the capitalised R but is pronounced redding.
@@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?
@@MusicalRadiation Very true
What would you say the most misleading word in Dutch is to pronounce? Or at least any particularly crazy ones that come to mind.
@@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 ;-)
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.
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.
Portuguese mentioned
Por mim, voltariamos á orthographia anterior á reforma dos annos 40.
@@desiderioelielton2051 Eu gosto de pharmacia e theatro, pela semelhança com o inglês, mas "anno" com dois Ns ultrapassa meu limite.
@ , a semelhança é com o grego translitterado pelos escriptores latinos.
Native portuguese speaker too, Mozambique
Can you elaborate on how EU and BR are always disagreeing on spelling and accents. I thought it was clear that brazillian portuguese was a bit different than european, why discuss or disagree?😂. Plus the language is from protugal howcome they want to argue about it😭
Sei lá não faz muito sentido
Another job well done, Rob! I also liked your new version of the alphabet you made that one time. Simply fine work, one of the best!
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).
@@fibanocci314I read it in an encyclopedia at age 8. Thought it was pen lope.
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!
Hi from the Gold Coast Australia
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.
It’s better that we did that. Pronouncing the K is weird and awkward.
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.
kenite
kenife
kenowu
Thank you for mentioning Turkish! Just a small correction: the letter “ğ” is a bit different from how you explained it. You can’t compare it to the silent “k” in “knife” or the “p” in “psalm” because in Turkish, the soft “ğ” stretches and softens the preceding vowel rather than being silent. For example, in the word “ağlamak” (to cry), it’s pronounced like “aːɫɑmɑk,” where the “a” sound is lengthened and kind of pronounced as “ay”. In “knife,” on the other hand, the “k” is completely silent.
K is completely silent but the following n is crisper : !nife, !nock, !nit !night. gh is also completely silent but the preceding vowel is not only long but thicker in the mouth Sight is thicker than site.
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.
It just cuts?
@@jeqsteaer a cut is a transition. Not a segue.
How was that a segue?
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.
German has an extra letter representing a double s (ss). It is called an 'ess-tzet' and looks like a fancy capital B.
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!
I love this so much, though I must point out that (I believe, correct me if I'm wrong) there are actually 5 total versions of the word "present." AKA all the more reason we need a system like this! I'm leaving out the dot cause my phone can't put it lol buuut...
present: gift, prèsent: now (time), presēnt: to give/show, prēsent: to send before, AND present: here (physically in a certain place).
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!
Pi
Your English is fucking fantastic
@@marcdragon2936 Good day, I do hope this message finds you in the most splendid of times! As English is but my third linguistic endeavor, I find myself occasionally at odds with its intricate nuances and delicate turns of phrase. Might I be so bold as to inquire whether you would be so kind as to impart upon me a few pearls of wisdom to aid in my humble quest for eloquence and mastery of this most esteemed tongue?
@@garrynewman6211 Good day to you as well, friend! As English is a language in which I've studied, particularly in relation to education, I am fully comprehensive of your struggle with its intricacies-
Fuck this.
I hate writing formal English.
When I write, I always write like I'm scripting a video. It's kind of how I learned to write.
I used to tell my students that they didn't have to write super formally, or have a lot of words.
I would usually grade essays and shit based on how well they got their point across. Or if it was an educational essay, it was how well they understood it and explained it in a way that was interesting.
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.
Demnächst: GI Jö Actionfiguren beim Billa... :D
@@KernelLeak LOL der war gut.
@@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?"😂
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.)
Having different spellings for different regions is fine :)
@@Liggliluff Yes, maybe it could even be beneficial: in a novel, when different characters spoke, we could "hear" their accents in our heads.
American English and British English fighting over who is the worst one while the rest just exist
@@paulnew2That's so true. Sometimes I just want to write a certain accent and there's not really a convenient way of doing it.
Hey there, I got to say: This video is awesome! All the information, and the editing style… it‘s great! I also agree to your statements, like with the breve, and over dot… So overall thanks for this video!
I love the Irish “fada” which literally translates to long. It’s put on vowels to make the sound longer. (á, é, í, ó, ú)
It is also put on vowels to change the way that every single letter around it sounds and make my life miserable as I attempt to learn irish
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 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.
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!
Hi , I just discovered your channel , it's one of the most interesting video I have seen about languages : for once you don't blame people who try to learn a foreign language but try to decipher why they could be confuse sometimes , it's very nice .
Being french myself , I am very disappointed at myself regarding my accent : I wish a software , an app will use your method to help people to improve their skills
For the anectode ( I learned that very recently ) : the letter ù exists only for the word ù in french.
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).
My primary school in Australia did the same thing when I was 5 or 6.
Common in most American English dictionaries.
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.
Just learned from this channel, I'm hooked, the guy is amazingly smart, and the subjects are super interesting. Love learning about languages. Cheers from South America.
I'm so happy I found out your channel recently. I find it fascinating and I really enjoy the way you present all this.
20:30 missed opportunity to write your local newspapers, thank the new Yorker for its dedication, and also send letters to dictionaries and associations.
True!
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.
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".
caramelo lover localizado
in Irish it changes the vowel from short to long
Oh, this is brilliant! What a clever way to make english easier to read!
There are so many of your videos that I wish I could give multiple "thumbs up" to. This is another one.
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!
That's right, everyone should learn a foreign language, it gives you insights you can never imagine being monolingual.
Dhis iz mi propózal for an Inglish spelling Refórm: a vejtabel iz a plaant or part ov a plaant dhat iz eeten az food. Potátoez, beenz and unnyonz ar aul vejtabelz.
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.
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 💖🇳🇿
When does the accent campaign start?
@@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.
You are so articulate and likeable bro
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).
I thought naive was pronounced nah-eve but ny-eve seems to be more common.
(Although they do sound similar when said quickly.)
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
Nice proposal, definitely worth trying. As a Spaniard speaking also English French Italian and in process of learning German I tell you accents are both helpful and cumbersome but help understand pronunciation much faster and help aloud double senses
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.
@@encycl07pedia- guess the rest of the world can't type then
@@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?
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!
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 👍
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.
I love these ideas, especially the diaeresis. I read Dracula recently and Bram Stoker uses one to spell words like 'zoölogical', I really enjoyed it.
Dhis iz mi propózal for an Inglish spelling Refórm: a vejtabel iz a plaant or part ov a plaant dhat iz eeten az food. Potátoez, beenz and unnyonz ar aul vejtabelz.
I like how Google translate is already savvy; now for... The rest of the Anglophone world to git gud 😩😨
Kikuyu also uses acute accent on the vowels i and u to emphasize the stress of vowels being rounded in pronunciation for instance: Wairimú and Karimí
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.
Hi, Rob! Been following you for a long time and for me this was the most fascinating video you've presented so far, I think the inclusion of these diacritics would make things much easier. My only problem is that at 92 plus years of age, it will take me some time to remember them. 🙂
Damn how was cleopatra
Me too, and I'm only 77.
@@AnonymousChannel512 I didn't stand a chance against Ptolemy XIII. Theos Philopator. Ptolemy XIV and Mark Antony 😀
This is brilliant, Rob! I can use this when I teach literacy to adults and children!
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".
This only serves to further illustrate the problem!
Ah, but wind is a noun, and doesn't rhyme with wind...😁
@@RobWordsOh Rob, you just split an infinitive. Trekkie much? 😁
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.
Thank you Rob. Before watching this entertaining video I had one language I could understand. Now I have none.
😂
To be fair, some accents use the schwa sound a lot less. I'm Glaswegian, in that example sentence at 5:05, I only use the "uh" sound twice in the O in brother & the U in purple. The E, A, PL & I are actually pronounced. It's also why we struggle to say the phrase "purple burglar alarm" here, the three A's in a row conflicts with each other in such a way that makes it difficult to say where a more Standard English accent would use the "uh" sound for the A in burglar.
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!
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.
Excellent point!
midshipman8654 - here's a mnemonic hint for you: 'seperate' - there's *a rat* in separate.
True, but I think we’d just get used to it. Eventually.
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.
0:39 I've learned to read, write, and speak English, not as my second, but fourth language! And opposed to French, I found it to be quite easy!
Merci, c'est beaucoup plus clair. ;-)
L'exemple avec les différents "present" est tellement illustratif.
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
No way, spelling is hard enough already. No need.
Read and read
@@friendlyfire7861 it's hard because it's so bad, diacritics would make it better
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 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.
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.)
Maybe they'd mispronounce them less if they weren't guessing as often?
Also "defiantly" (definitely).
Wow! I am so happy to have found you on youtube. I just subscribed and watched 3 videos so far (to date) lol Anyway, i agree completely with you on adding diacritical marks for clarity. I teach reading by Phonics and also some sight words that can't be explained phonetically. Diacritical marks work do get the job done faster! The kids grasp them and use them to decode words that they are unfamiliar with. I love your idea and wish it would be taught her in America. I use them all of the time in my Phonics program called the The 44 Sounds Method/Game. Thanks for your channel. I also agree to learn at least one other language and I will be using the Pimsleur method for Spanish. Thanks for your videos and i look forward to viewing more after today.
In portuguese we use the ~ to represent nasality in a vowel, i.e Pan -> pã; pagan -> pagão; manus (latin for hand) -> mão, etc.
it's also a good shibboleth to catch gringos trying to pass as speakers of the language. Takes them years to nail it.
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) 🤪
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
I just noticed how weird it is that the P was added to *receipt,* but not to *deceit* or *conceit.*
@@thatothertedaren’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 knew he reminded me of someone
@@Alphabunsquadno
@@thatotherted It signifies a correlation between 'reciept' and 'recipient'. Just as 'debt' and 'debit' or 'sign' and 'signal'
Thank you 🙏🏻 I enjoyed it so much that I need to watch it twice ❤
We should start using these, or at least some of them... For years I have proposed using the macron to differentiate between short and long vowels, and that was really pleasantly surprising seeing you suggest that in this video... The other diacritics were interesting to see as well!
The only thing that was different was I had thought of using the macron only in situations where words are spelled the same but have a different vowel sound, such as "wind" and "wīnd", or "bass" and "bāss", "lead" or "lēad", etc, etc.... That could be a simple step towards the more comprehensive revisions you mentioned 🤷
I think the breve is a great idea for English classes when learning new vocabulary (and for ESOL learners in general), and maybe on official public signage, but I can't imagine myself bothering to write them in any other context. I'd frankly rather just drop those letters than start adding extra strokes to indicate they're silent.
I think the schwa symbol would be tricky, because sometimes words that are typically pronounced with a schwa can change to another sound in certain contexts, particularly when an unstressed syllable becomes emphasized, like "He was THEE (the) greatest of all time" or "I could give you AY (a) dollar, but definitely not five." And then do you remove the schwa overdot and consider them separate words even though the only change is the emphasis? That and the confusion over different accents (which I know you brought up) makes this kind of a no-go for me.
How does the macron below interact with underlining? It feels like it would get in the way. I don't see why we wouldn't just put it on the top of the letter. I think it would look tidier that way anyway. Even if it's more symbols in the same general area, it's organized and consistent. Having just one symbol that lives underneath feels random and chaotic to me. If we had cedillas to give them company, I might feel differently.
I like the diaeresis, but I don't know how often it would come up, and googling English words that could use it was a challenge for me. I could only find the co- and re- prefix examples you gave here, in which case I think a hyphen works just fine.
I don't mind the grave to distinguish words, but I would only use them for very common words that are both pronounced and spelled exactly the same, like the foreign language examples you give. La/là (the/there) and ou/où (or/where) are all extremely common words (you could argue they're fundamental, even - words you might use several times a day), and I think that's what makes the diacritic worthwhile. I don't see the point for the English examples you gave. If then/than or are/our were spelled the same, they would be great candidates for that diacritic, as basic building block words of English, but they aren't. The best examples I can think of that might be worth it in my mind are right/right (correct vs not left), too/too (also vs. excessively), and maybe one/one (if you want to distinguish either person from object, or noun from adjective). That said, they don't seem easy to confuse in context.
I actually pronounce then/than differently, and are/our differently. Would I need the mark to distinguish hour from our?
@@LookingForAnotherPlanet Since they're already spelled differently, I wouldn't use a mark to distinguish hour from our.
I discovered this channel by accident and I am hooked. I find it so refreshing that someone wants to improve our understanding of the English language rather than dumb it down with the use of emojis and text slang.
Dumbing it down is simply better for a world in which we mostly communicate through text on a screen.
@@Merluch there is so much more use going on with a language than dumb internet talk
@@oh-noe meh not really.
Internet is where much of our communication happens nowadays
@@Merluch just because you spend your entire life on the internet doesn’t mean others do as well
English indeed needs it. It's to make reading easier for a learner. We have a similar case in my mother tongue, Tyap, in central Nigeria, where there are different intonations but just the acute accent is used for writing to denote plural nouns having the same spellings with their singular counterparts and for differentiating certain words with the same spelling but different meanings. I think we need more accents rather than just one. The main goal is ease in understanding the written language for the learner. Thanks for this lesson, Sir.
Your videos always reach a very high cultural level, and your explanations are never boring. I like them very much!
Agreed - and also Rob's pleasant sounding voice and clear pronunciation.
I agree his pronunciation is so perfect and easy to understand.@@stephenbaker7079
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.
Writing a diacritic sign is as much effort as adding the line on the t's.
@@tantuce depending on whether you're typing or writing
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.