Comment by NeoTar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NeoTar | Hacker News Reader

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It’s a fascinating subject.

I think a lot of the English peculiarities with spelling come from it adopting other vocabulary without enforcing a change to English orthography onto it, so we end up with a crazy mix of Germanic, French, Latin, Greek and other language spelling conventions. Also English speakers were perhaps more willing to coin Latin/Greek terms for new objects than other languages - contrast ‘television’ from Greek and Latin in English, with Fernseher (literally far-looker) in German.

With respect to dialectical marks, I’m not sure why English in general doesn’t use them (although some might argue we do if we spell words café or naïve), but they don’t seem to be ‘fashionable’ in related languages - Dutch doesn’t seem to use them either, and in German they feel somewhat optional - ä, ö and ü can be replaced with ae, oe and ue respectively (e.g. where the accented forms aren’t available) and ß can be replaced with ss. Indeed correct alphabetical sorting of German demands this.

> naïve

There are actually a good number of words that historically used a diaeresis in English, especially up until about a century ago: noël, reëlect, reënter, Chloë, Zoë, noöne, preëmpt, daïs, coöperate, coöpt, coördinate, zoölogy...

The idea was to ensure that the second vowel would be seen as its own syllable.

I'll give the obligatory comment about the New Yorker magazine, which still uses these diaereses... for some reason.

Because the spelling would otherwise be ambiguous.

Dutch is not as stable as other languages over time. We've had a few spelling reforms and trying to read 17th century Dutch is actually not that easy even for native speakers. Old Dutch is more similar to German than modern Dutch.

I live in Germany and I always joke that Dutch is basically simplified German. The two languages are obviously related but we got a bit pragmatic about some of their more convoluted grammar choices and they gradually disappeared from the language. For example, we have male and female words but we only use two instead of three articles: de for male/female, het for the neutral form instead of die/der/das. Which is similar to the English the and it. Several articles still used in German (e.g. des and den) completely disappeared from the language but used to be common. A nice example where you still see this are place names like Den Haag or s'Gravenhage, which is short for Des Gravenhage and refers to the same city (The Hague).

As for accents, those would be one of the things that got removed from the language or have become optional. E.g. you don't see a lot of ë used in modern Dutch anymore but that is a recent change (in the nineties). The use of computers has accelerated this because we use keyboards without support for this (English layout basically). In highschool, I used things like wordperfect and memorized some of the key codes for accents so I could type this letter. Oddly, an e with an umlaut is not a thing in German or in French.

Also as you mention we use letter combinations for things that have e.g. an umlaut in German. For example ö is written "eu" in Dutch. The ü becomes "uu" and we use oe for the German u. French accents used to be common but have not survived language reforms. We even have some 3 and 4 letter combinations that tend to confuse the hell out of foreigners. E.g. the Dutch translation of lion would be leeuw. Löwe in German would be close in pronounciation.

I lived in Sweden for a while. The Scandinavians did a similar modernization and simplification of their grammar last century. This actually makes it relatively easy to learn. It's a pretty regular language with a fairly straightforward grammar. Also, the grammars of Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish are basically the same. The Swedish use a few different letters e.g. ö in Swedish vs. ø in Norwegian and Danish. But otherwise the languages are very similar in written form. Icelandic is a bit weirder but basically a Scandinavian language as well.

"...in German they feel somewhat optional - ä, ö and ü can be replaced with ae, oe and ue respectively"

At least in German you've got those options. For instance, Gärtner becomes Gaertner without any loss of information. That cannot be said for English when the only (usual) option is to change the word to Gartner.

> contrast ‘television’ from Greek and Latin in English

I recall reading somewhere that back in the day, there were complaints that this new word coinage "television" would never catch on specifically because it mixed Greek and Latin.

> dialectical marks

Of course dialectical Marx is something else entirely.

I wonder how personalized are autocompletions on Android and iPhone. How strongly could we infer, if at all, that someone had used the term dialectical before? Are autocompletions personalized enough that they might suggest dialectical over diacritic because someone had used (or received!) words like Hegel or capitalism? (Or maybe we could merely only infer someone's phone is using a European English word probability database as in European discourse dialectics might be even more common than diacritics. ;)

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