[Swizec]

A funny thing happened in Slovenian, particularly colloquial Slovenian. We have accents. Many accents. Each vowel has several different pronunciations and sometimes those completely change the meaning of a word. Or they make the text flow better. Or it's an accent thing.

Either way the language has many accents in writing.

But over time, those accents are disappearing. Written Slovenian from the 19th century is absolutely littered with them. Modern Slovenian in colloquial writing is starting to lose even the č, š, ž accents.

Interestingly, people don't compensate with things like cz, or ch, or cx. They rely on context informing the reader how to pronounce a word.

I believe the loss of accents on vowels happened because they're not that necessary. The loss of č š ž is happening because of computers. Takes an extra keypress to type those. On iOS/Android it takes a long press and who has time for that when typing a text? Nobody. So we don't.

Could Spanish not work similarly? Do Spanish people write out all the accents when sending a text?

I know my French girlfriend doesn't always write all her accents and French is also chock full of accents.

[cageface]

Something similar is happening in Vietnamese and I think smartphones are to blame. Writing properly accented Vietnamese on mobile keyboards, particularly the iPhone, is pretty tedious so people often leave out the accents and rely on context to figure out meanings. Unfortunately for a language like Vietnamese which has tons of monosyllable words and where the accent markings completely change the meaning of a word this can lead to a lot of ambiguity.

Why a company with Apple's resources can't be bothered to implement proper autocorrect for a bit market with 80+ million native speakers is a mystery to me.

[lphnull]

I could be wrong, but don't people have autocorrect on their phones that will correct the character based on context? Is that even possible?

Lets say somebody wants to say "how I eat" in spanish. The correct way to do it would be "cómo como". "cómo" means how, and "como" means "I eat". I wouldn't make sense to say "como cómo", so therefore, autocorrect should, in theory, feel free to correct all instances of "como como". Only until it becomes an international household brand name will this ever be a problem- for this one phrase at least.

[Swizec]

Afaik autocorrect doesn’t work for Slovenian. And even if it does, most people I know have it disabled because our colloquialisms use a lot of English, some German, plenty of Serbocroatian, and sometimes Italian. We often spell those loan words our own way.

This combination of languages and intentionally incorrect spellings makes autocorrect total trash.

[dbrgn]

"como como un mono" (I eat like a monkey)

[hjrnunes]

There is a trend that confuses this (apparent) simplification trend with "evolution" or "progress".

Don't fool yourself, though.

Accents are there for a reason.

Orthography influences pronunciation. In time people will start pronouncing those words as the orthography suggests rather than deducing it from the context.

Even if only because the context won't be discernible. But, generally, because of the principle of the lesser effort: it's always easier to just read what is there than thinking which pronunciation applies.

Eventually, the words will become homophonous (edit: assuming there are other words which differ only in the accents) - you'll effectively loose the words or they'll change, probably for worse.

The language will become more ambiguous and more dependent on the context knowledge - which will be hard to get if you don't know the language well to begin with.

In other words, you've just made the language "harder" to learn.

So, in effect, it's not a simplification at all.

[em-bee]

Orthography influences pronunciation. In time people will start pronouncing those words as the orthography suggests rather than deducing it from the context.

is there any evidence for that?

anecdotal evidence in english for example suggests just the opposite: light -> lite, etc

however learning a language as a child growing up, vs as a second language later are quite different, and the dynamics that affect language change are hence very different too.

http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/m.html explains how esperanto is unlikely to change, and also why that would be a good thing.

back to your argument, i don't think the words with different pronunciation would be lost, but certainly the language would be harder to learn.

[hjrnunes]

English is atypical in its irregular pronunciation rules IMO. At least compared to Latin languages. And it doesn't have accents that change the pronunciation in otherwise similar words.

As such, people are aware that you just have to know how to pronounce every particular word, rather than relying solely on orthography.

Anyway, your example isn't very good: "light" and "lite" are homophonous anyway.

A better one would be "calm". The "l" is almost mute. Presumably, one could "simplify" the orthography to "cam". And you would pronounce "kom" or "kam" according to context.

I claim one of the pronunciations would eventually disappear, sooner or later.

If you're asking for a "scientific study", I don't have one and I don't even know where such a thing can be found.

But the country I'm from has had 3 orthographic reforms in the 20th century. The last one being all about removing supposed "mute" consonants - but which acted like accents in that they altered pronunciation of the word.

[kevinios]

Exactly! And I see that typewriters were invented in 1878, so the difficulty to type Esperanto with typewriters was most probably not taken into account when it was invented.