I ran across this entertaining video on why English should start using more accents

James Montalbano

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Fok5AQ2WRo

Mark Simonson

It’s a sensible idea, but seems very unlikely to be adopted.

I do enjoy watching this guy’s videos, though.

John Hudson

Also, when it comes to silent letters, English has nothing on Norwegian.

James Montalbano

I do enjoy watching this guy’s videos, though.

I agree Mark. Here is one of him discussing the origins of punctuation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9Re5otW-v0

Russell McGorman

That wȧs fun... I don't see it be adopted anytime soon. I think we'd all be surprised by the reaction...  All those "foreign" fly specs. "Nō wā!!
(BTW, back in grade 1 when I was leaning to read we had to mark long and short vowels with breves and macrons.)

I'll have to find out if he's done one on why gendered words were dropped from Old English... I seem to recall it was something to do with Vikings being lazy language learners.

Yves Michel

Where are we going with this if the French people are able to pronounce English like it should be?
Very funny!

Russell McGorman

Russell McGorman said:

I was leaning to read 

Leaning to read? I wasn't quite the eager.

Nick Shinn

Thanks for posting James, that’s a fascinating and very well-made video.

As training wheels for second language beginners, it might help, and be worthy of a pilot project.
For teaching native English speakers, a can of worms.
As a thought experiment that illuminates the nature of visual language, brilliant! 

John Savard

I think I did run across the video. I don't think the idea is one that could ever be adopted in practice. Except, of course, to the extent that it already has.

Many Bibles are "self-pronouncing", using a large set of accents to indicate the correct pronunciation of Biblical names without altering how they are spelled.

So a prototype for annotated English already exists.

Peter Constable

Do we say /brēv/ or ... wait, how in his system do you write (IPA) /ɛ/?

(Switching to IPA...)

Do we say /briːv/ or /brɛv/?

Do we say /greːv/ (for the accent) or /graːv/?

John Hudson

I say /brɛvə/.

Joshua Langman

I say "bray-vay" and "grayv." ("Grahv" is French.) Interestingly, the dictionary seems to think "breve" is monosyllabic.

Kent Lew

FWIW, I tend to pronounce them as the French — /brɛv/ and /grɑːv/ — since I first became acquainted with these accent marks in a college French class. (But I don’t call an acute “aigu”. 😉)