[eesmith]

Yes, and how do those entirely true observations connect to the non-use of diacritics in English?

I pointed out the ship example from the text, which was used to demonstrate how "this early French influence over English, which arose from the Norman Conquest, is the beginning of the reason why English is written without accent marks. ... This was the French habit that the Normans brought to England: the use of extra letters to spell sounds that the alphabet didn’t have special letters for. This is why English has combinations like sh, th, ee, oo, ou that each make only a single sound."

That's an extra letter being used to indicate a different sound than the base sound, similar to how diacritics are used to indicate a different sound than the base sound ("the cedilla has the function of ensuring that a c can be pronounced like an s, despite coming before an a, o, or, u").

[6P58r3MXJSLi]

> "is the beginning of the reason why English is written without accent marks" > sh, th, ee, oo, ou

That's cool 'n all, but I believe that only applies to French writing in English for English people.

Many languages have combinations of letters that have a single sound, it's no excuse for not having accents.

In German one can write strasse and straße or müller and mueller (different writing, same sound). They too don't have accents, but words written differently also sound different: schon = "already" and schön = "beautiful".

But German, on one hand retained diacritic marks, on the other it's also almost deterministic about pronunciation.

a it's always /a/

ä it's always /ɛ/ or /ə/ like e

sch it's always /ʃ/ as in schule

ch it's always /x/ after a, o, u and /ç/ after e, i

and so on

English doesn't use diacritics, IMO, because English doesn't make sense, it's a pastiche of lowest common denominators, so fck diacritics, they are too hard, let's write words as we like and pronounce them the way we feel they should sound, regardless of how they are written.

But it could use accents, for example rècord and recòrd, present and presènt, pérmit and permìt it's just they never thought it could be useful...

[int_19h]

> Many languages have combinations of letters that have a single sound, it's no excuse for not having accents.

You don't need an "excuse" for not having accents. Digraphs and diacritical marks are simply two different ways to mark a letter as being pronounced as "somewhat similar but different". Whether one is better than the other is a matter of subjective perception, and it's very common for languages to not do it consistently. For example, Spanish has "ll" but also "ñ" (ironically the latter used to be "nn"!), and Czech has "č" but also "ch".

What's criminal about English is not the lack of diacritics, but rather the extremely convoluted and hard to predict rules for interpreting digraphs and trigraphs. If "ch" always meant the same thing, it would be just fine.

[6P58r3MXJSLi]

> "somewhat similar but different"

about accents, see my examples. they are used to disambiguate, which is a bonus in itself.

> If "ch" always meant the same thing, it would be just fine.

that is my take too: in German you have ss and ß, for historical reasons, but both sound the same and have a predictable pronunciation, always.

[eesmith]

> but I believe that only applies to French writing in English for English people

Shrug. Yes, languages have different paths in their evolution. Film at 11.

I still like what this linguistics PhD wrote about the specific history of one aspect of English language evolution.

> English doesn't make sense

That is of course an exaggeration. Just because the rules are complex and full of exceptions doesn't mean there's no sense. Even if you reject all of linguistics, Shannon in “Prediction and entropy of printed English”, demonstrated that English is compressible, which means there must be some patterns.

Now to drink some maté.

[6P58r3MXJSLi]

> Just because the rules are complex and full of exceptions doesn't mean there's no sense

That's exactly what "makes no sense" means, actually.

> demonstrated that English is compressible

of course it is

> which means there must be some patterns

Of course there are. Patterns are (almost) everywhere - even PI is normal, but not random - but patterns in English make little or no sense for a language born and developed among, in the same era and having close contact with, a lot of other much more regular languages. The two facts are orthogonal.

Even Sumerian is more regular than modern English...