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

James Montalbano
James Montalbano Posts: 109
edited January 29 in Technique and Theory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Fok5AQ2WRo

Comments

  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,746
    edited January 29
    It’s a sensible idea, but seems very unlikely to be adopted.

    I do enjoy watching this guy’s videos, though.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,349
    Also, when it comes to silent letters, English has nothing on Norwegian.
  • James Montalbano
    James Montalbano Posts: 109
    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
    Russell McGorman Posts: 264
    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
    Yves Michel Posts: 202
    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 Posts: 264
    Russell McGorman said:
    I was leaning to read 
    Leaning to read? I wasn't quite the eager.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,253
    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
    John Savard Posts: 1,149
    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
    Peter Constable Posts: 227
    edited February 8
    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
    John Hudson Posts: 3,349
    I say /brɛvə/.
  • Joshua Langman
    Joshua Langman Posts: 87
    I say "bray-vay" and "grayv." ("Grahv" is French.) Interestingly, the dictionary seems to think "breve" is monosyllabic.
  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 973
    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”. 😉)

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