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Comment by cmehdy | Hacker News Reader

Similarly in French, some accents are casually going away and certain differences are also slowly eroding (for example in English you put no space between words and punctuation while in French you do[1], but a lot of French stuff online is written English-style nowadays).

Internet in western countries really is creating some kind of English-centered shockwave.

It's true (to a much lesser extent) in other languages. Japanese internet slang[2] is still very Japanese but has stuff directly borrowed or adapted from English for a lot of new tech.

I'm getting into sci-fi territory now, but I think the Belta Creole[3] of "The Expanse" shows a cool futuristic take on a blend of languages where English still has the bulk of the real estate.

[1] https://www.francaisfacile.com/exercices/exercice-francais-2...

[2] https://www.fluentu.com/blog/japanese/japanese-internet-slan...

[3] https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Belter_Creole

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Does French not have problems with different words that if the accents are removed get written the same way, but have incompatible meanings?

Portuguese is full of those, and it's a major source of resistance on changing the language in Brazil. (Although Brazilian resistance may look like plain acceptance from French standards.)

Not so much. French tends to have words that are pronounced the same but are written differently thanks to all the silent letters and combinations that are pronounced the same:

vers, verre, vert.

mer, mère, maire.

In writing you can usually do away with all the accents (many of them are grammatical or the strictly correct spelling but without changing the pronunciation and with little change of the 'look' of the word) without problems.

To add on to that,

The only “important” accented letter is “é”. In most cases “è” is completely redundant as it follows the rule that if the next vowel is a silent “e” then the current “e” takes the \ε\ sound. “Ê” makes the same sound but is there for historical reasons. We can determine if we need an open “e” sound by applying like 2 rules (the aforementioned one and e followed by two consonants is always open) and by memorising some of the multigraphs which are part of the phonetics as it is.

Removing “é” makes it harder to determine pronunciation and makes it easier to confuse tenses, eg “il a mange”, if you’re reading you might “a” and misunderstand the tense (he ate vs he eats). There aren’t any consistent rules for the use of “é” apart from the start of a word.

Personally speaking, I rely on “é” a lot more than I do on “è” and I’ve been tripped up by a missing ’ on “e” many times unlike the other one.

il aime vs. il a aimé

la porte vs. il a porté

etc.

there are definitely words in French, where the accent makes a difference in pronunciation. there are also some cases where there are meaning differences, even when the words are pronounced the same e.g. du vs. dû.

Now it's usually not a problem, as ambiguity in general is rarely a problem in language due to context.

"il a aimé" without accent is not "il aime" it's "il a aime", which people will understand is missing the accent. Likewise for your other example.

It requires me a mental effort without the accent, though, and I will register it as a typo. You might as well write "il a aimer". The later sounds the same as with the accent, but it's obviously very wrong to put an infinitive there.

I guess I proved your point to some extent: I care less about accent errors than other mistakes, and just consider it a typo. But reading a completely unaccented text is hard for me, and I text, e-mail, and communicate online a lot.

In my experience, people are not foregoing them on purpose, except on capital letters, which is an heritage of AZERTY keyboards + windows (hopefully AFNOR keyboards catches on). Capital accented letters is the example to cite if you want an example of computer technology changing our habits: my friend Etienne (Étienne?) insists there is no accent on hist first name, but it makes no sense to me.

But the point wasn't that you can't recover the meaning from context. Languages are full of homonyms and homographs, and even typos and outright errors usually don't hinder understanding.

The point was simply that accents in French can change pronunciation, or at least change the meaning even if the pronunciation remains the same.

I think the question was whether dropping the accents make reading a text difficult. Of course that may change words so requires a bit more effort but in general it's not that big a deal.

Also French already has words that are written the same (homographs) but do not sound the same (not homophons), i.e.:

il est content (= he's happy)

ils content (= they are telling a story)

... so one less accent doesn't hurt that much :)

Those are heteronyms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics)

> Similarly in French, some accents are casually going away

In my view this is partly because of the 'focus' (or lack thereof) of the education system and partly because most software is developed in English first with the addition of accents an add-on, which makes typing accents cumbersome and thus the path of least resistance is to give up, especially when writing casually.

Yeah, since I've moved away from an AZERTY to a QWERTY I cannot imagine ever reverting back, but on the other hand this means no accent is directly accessible.

As of right now I'm on a mac and I feel very comfortable with the way they've designed input for "roman accented" letters (using the option key, or for some using long presses) but it's a whole other thing once I see a Windows computer.

> since I've moved away from an AZERTY to a QWERTY I cannot imagine ever reverting back, but on the other hand this means no accent is directly accessible

You can use QWERTY with accents very easily with "International keyboard with dead keys"[1]. You can configure OS to switch keyboard with Alt+Shift to have the regular QWERTY and the International-QWERTY when you need it.

[1] https://web.cortland.edu/ponterior/keyboard/#:~:text=The%20U....

Moved from German QWERTZ and never looked back as well. I figured QWERTY with Eurkey layout[0] is a good middle ground. As it allows me to use EN_US as a base for programming, but access umlauts, accentos and such if needed.

[0]: https://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu

Have you considered the CSA layout? It's QWERTY, but the most commonly used accented characters are easily accessible. It's not ergonomic for programming, but switching between US and CSA doesn't require a significant adjustment (once you're used to it, at least).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSA_keyboard

Seems like a good one, and pretty fitting considering I'm in Canada right now :)

I'll keep it in mind if I end up making myself a desktop PC in the future. But I guess the hardest part about any good alternative design isn't so much the design itself but its adoption and how often you're interacting with it to rewire your brain.

I have created my own QWERTY-US-International Keyboard Layout which puts German special letters (and other European letters) near their actual ones. With Ukulele you could do the same for the French alphabet: https://leipert.io/keyboard-layout/

> in English you put no space between words and punctuation

In “typewriter” English which is dominant because of, first, typewriters and then ASCII and then keyboards and then familiarity (as unicode and mobile keyboard usually support additional characters easily), that's true of almost all punctuation. In typeset English (which Unicode in principle supports), it's true of somewhat less punctuation.

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