Why E̱NGLISH shoul̆d start ūsing accėnt màrks
(00:00) Loads of languages use accent marks. A flick here a squiggle there a dot or maybe two. Each one helping to make the language easier to read. (00:11) But why doesn’t English have them? Well you know what? English should. And I’ve come up with a way we can use them. Inspired by other languages near and far I hereby present to you: accents for English. (00:25) By the way, it’s unbelievably cold out here so stick around to see how far I get before my camera dies. Okay. Anyone who has grappled with English spelling will know the problems I’m trying to solve here. (00:38) If you’ve learned to read English as a second language - respect to you. Because people learning to do so tend to lament the same litany of literal illogicalities. They say: “What’s with all the silent letters?” “Why aren’t these vowels pronounced the same?” “How am I supposed to know which bit of the word to emphasise?” And “How do I tell apart two words that are spelt the same?” Well, with my new regime of accent marks, I plan to put an end to all this confusion. The aim here is to fix English without the need for spelling reform so no adding or removing (01:13) letters. No new characters. See what you make of it and let me know in the comments. Let’s begin by tackling one of the most bizarre quirks of English: our excess of silent letters. I mean, they’re everywhere. Some because we’ve just got out of the habit of saying them. Others because they’re a bit hard to pronounce. And others still that have been intentionally put there by show-off scholars just wanting to demonstrate their knowledge of Latin. (01:41) But how on earth is someone new to the language supposed to know when a letter isn’t meant to be pronounced? Like the B in plumber or L in salmon? There doesn’t appear to be any logic at all. Well this is where an accent - or as they’re technically known, a diacritical mark - could come in handy. I’ve searched through other languages that use the Latin alphabet to see how they’ve approached this problem. And basically: almost none of them have needed to. (02:11) English is infected with a uniquely violent strain of silentletteritis. But I did find a little something in Turkish that I think can help us out. Turkish has this letter, which is pronounced /g/. But it also has this letter which is pronounced: [crickets chirping] It’s silent. Now, this letter isn’t as pointless as, say, the B in doubt because it does affect the word. It changes the sound of the vowel before it. But effectively what differentiates Turkish’s G from its silent equivalent is this little fellow on top. This itty bitty (02:50) bow is called a breve - a word, which literally means brief and I think it makes for the perfect adornment for our silent letters in English. I propose we use it above silent consonants wherever they may appear. Not the ones that are part of letter combinations, but the ones that seem completely pointless. Like in island or indict. In honour or in knife. (03:17) Welcome to the English language, the breve. After all, a sound can’t get any briefer than never starting in the first place. So that’s going to go a long way to making confusing consonants a bit clearer. But really, English’s biggest problem is with its vowels. The Roman alphabet simply doesn’t have enough of them. Spoken English has around 20 vowel sounds - the exact number depends on your accent - but our alphabet only has these 5 vowels, plus Y when it fee… [click] [Rob off screen] Ah. Oh dear. (03:56) So it turned out my microphone succumbed to the cold before my camera did. Something I only discovered after spending another half an hour freezing my, erm, fingers off. So I hope you’ll excuse me if I do the rest of this video from the warmth of my apartment. Now where was I? Ah yes, the Roman alphabet being rubbish. So like I said, spoken English has around 20 vowel sounds but our alphabet only has 5 vowels. Or six if you include Y because it sometimes is one. And I suppose 7 if you’re a fan of borrowed Welsh words and you want to include W. (04:37) But even if we’re charitable and say there are seven, not one of them on its own represents the most common vowel sound - indeed the most common sound - in English. I’m talking about the rather unenthusiastic sounding “uh”. Now that sound is known as schwa and it is basically our default vowel sound. It is everywhere. (05:02) Take the sentence “my brother has a purple pencil”. It’s there, there, there, there, there and there, being represented by A, E, I, O and U. So how on earth is the unacquainted reader supposed to know when a letter is meant to be pronounced as a schwa? Well that is where our next mark comes in. Albanian and the Slavic language of Kashubian both use this character to represent that /uh/ sound and I think we can do something similar. Now, I don’t think we should take both of those dots because we’re already doing something with two dots in English - if (05:46) you’re confused, don’t worry, I’ll explain later. Instead, let’s just take one of the dots. For English’s most common sound I think it’s important that we keep things as simple as possible and what could be simpler than just [pop] a dot. And from now on, I say we should use the overdot to signify when a vowel should sound like a schwa. (06:11) Like this. Admittedly, for some accents this could get a little out of hand. Perticulerler fer perple wher sperk lerk thers. Okay, no one speaks like that, but the point I’m making is that some accents use the schwa a lot more than others. But I’m confident we can find a sensible standard covering words that are not accent-dependent. (06:34) Now our work here is by no means done. I think we can do more to make it easier to understand English’s exhaustingly inconsistent vowels and I think we can do it with help from macron. [Emmanuel Macron:] Moi? [Rob:] No, not you monsieur. [Macron:] Pardon. (06:50) I mean the little line that you can see here. To find this solution, I haven’t actually travelled to another part of the world, but instead I’ve travelled back in time, because this solution is inspired by Old English. Now admittedly, the macron wasn’t used by the Anglo-Saxons who were actually speaking Old English but it does appear in modern transcriptions of Old English as a way of indicating to the reader when a vowel sound should be long rather than short. Something very similar is done when writing out Latin - Classical Latin - or Ancient Greek and also with Sanskrit too. (07:30) So I propose we use the macron in Modern English to help us differentiate between short and long vowelsas well. We can have cost and most; hint and hind; flange and change. We can even have look and loop if we want! Can you see how that’s helpful? And before you ask - the macrons won’t be confused with the breves because we’re only using the breves on consonants and the macrons on vowels. See! I’m not stupid. (08:04) So please give a warm welcome to macron. [Macron:] Est-ce que c’est moi? [Rob:] No, still not you. Although don’t some Americans pronounce your name Macrone? Now, more accents inspired by foreign languages still to come but isn’t it fascinating to see how others handle stuff like this? You know, my whole interest in English came as a result of learning French and German, because it meant that I looked at English with new eyes and that’s one of the many reasons why I would recommend that everybody learns at least one foreign language. (08:35) And alIow me to also recommend to you Babbel, who’ve sponsored this video. Babbel is one of the top language learning apps in the world. I’ve been using it to learn Spanish because the idea of being able to speak to an extra 500 million people across the globe appeals to me enormously. Plus, I have some Spanish friends who I would love to be able to surprise. [Babbel app:] Podemos hacer algo [Rob:] Podemos hacer algo Babbel’s great because it has such a wide array of teaching resources like live teaching (09:04) sessions, podcasts, games and of course, lessons you can do wherever and whenever you want. Incluso en el baño. Babbel teaches you using real-world conversations. And I’ve found myself making quick progress, because you’re right away learning sentences that you can actually use. Spanish is one of my projects for this year. Why not make learning a language one of yours too? Use my link in the description and get 60% off your Babbel subscription. (09:34) What are we waiting for? Vamos! Now, for our next English fix, I’m taking my inspiration from beautiful, beautiful Spanish. Specifically this marvellous little marker that appears above some Spanish words. It’s called an acute accent and it makes reading Spanish so much easier. One of the most magnificent things about Español is that syllable emphasis - also known as stress - is extremely consistent. Basically, you almost always stress the second to last syllable in a word. It’s a little bit more complicated than that, but that’s more-or-less (10:13) it. And when a word breaks that rule, and you are in fact supposed to stress a different syllable, written Spanish gives you a little heads up. It adds that little acute accent above the bit that you’re actually meant to emphasise. Now I think we should learn from this - because in English knowing which syllable to emphasise - or emPHAsise, or emphaSISE - can be a bit of a nightmare. So I propose we have our own marker for stress. However, I don’t want to start using the acute accent. (10:47) For a start, it already appears in some English words, particularly those we’ve borrowed from French but also, we don’t want the space above our words to get too cluttered, so we can’t put all of our new accents up there. Instead on this occasion, I’m going to call back our old friend macron. No, still not you. [Macron:] Sorry. (11:05) This one again. But instead of having it above a letter we’re going to stick it below. I mean, this just makes sense, right? We already underline things to emphasise them. That’s also traditionally the method used by proofreaders to tell the printer to put something in italics to emphasise it. So sticking a line under a syllable to show that it’s stressed just seems sort of intuitive. But let’s not put it under the entire syllable. We can take a leaf out of Spanish’s book and we’ll just focus on the relevant vowel. (11:36) By the way, it can be difficult to find a way to type one of these, so let’s say you can just underline it or underscore it too. As long as there’s a line down there, I think we’re all good. Let’s be sparing with it, but I think this one can really come in handy. For example, the words channel and canal have exactly the same etymological root - they both come from this Old French word - but there is a barely-explicable difference in emphasis between them. (12:05) So let’s help readers out by pointing out that one is pronounced CHANnel and the other is caNAL. Actually, that’s not the best example, because in English a schwa is never stressed, and helpfully we’ve already pointed out where the schwas are in these words. But you do get what I mean, right. No need to emphasise my point further. That was a pun. (12:28) Now, another common complaint about English that we need to resolve is that we have a lot of words that are spelt the same as one another but mean different things. Sometimes they’re not just spelt the same, but they’re pronounced the same too. These are called homographs from the Greek for “written the same”. (12:47) These of course do exist in other languages, but some languages have clever ways of avoiding any ambiguity. For example, in both French and Italian one of the words for “the” is la. But also in both languages there is a word spelt L A and pronounced la that means “there”. That’s a recipe for confusion, surely? But no one ever gets muddled up because both languages have very handily popped a little accent on the latter là so that you can tell the two apart. (13:22) French has done the same with ou meaning “or” and ou meaning “where” as well. That diacritic is called a grave and we should be using it too. That way we’ll know the difference between mean as in “nasty” and mean as in “average”; present as in “gift” and present as in “here”. And while we’re at it, what’s to stop us doing the same for words that are spelt the same, but are pronounced differently? After all, they still look identical on the page, don’t they? Let’s take inspiration from Dutch, for example, which uses accents to differentiate between (13:55) its words for een and één, both of which I’m sure I’ve pronounced very badly, but which otherwise would be identically written. So I say we do the same with our words bow and bow, minute and minute - I genuinely once embarrassingly ordered a my-newt steak - close and close, wind and wind, wound and wound. Now what I’ve tried to do with these is put the accent over the ones that just seem like they have the more prominent vowel sound. (14:28) But we can have a conversation about whether that’s appropriate. I’m open to alternative suggestions. I think the logic used in French is that the accent goes on the one that’s used the least often. I If you’ve got strong thoughts on that, by all means pop them in the comments below. And at this point I think we should just stop to drink in what we’ve already achieved here. Let's do that by looking at a word I’ve already mentioned. This one. (14:54) Or rather: these four. Because these are all different words, but under our current writing regime it is impossible to tell what any of them mean. However, allow me to show you how the accents we’ve so far discussed magically make all of that uncertainty disappear. First of all, let me add them. There they are. (15:18) Now let’s talk through them. So the first one is present - a gift. The dot over the second e tells you it’s that “uh” sound. It’s present. The second one is also present, but this time meaning, you know,“now”. And we can tell it apart from the other present because we’ve popped that grave accent on top. (15:41) The third one is present - like to present a prize - with the emphasis on the second syllable. I could have put a schwa dot on the first e, but not everyone pronounces it that way. And finally, what is that last one? What do you think? Okay, it’s a bit of a cheeky one. (15:59) So this one is actually pre-sent, which you might otherwise write like that I suppose, but look how I’ve saved some space. The macron on the first e tells you that it’s a long ee sound and we don’t need anything else because we’re giving equal weight to both syllables. So we get pre-sent. So there we go: four words that once looked the same are now easily told apart. (16:27) Okay, I’m still not done but time for a change of tack. This time, I don’t want to propose anything new. Instead I want to advocate for the expansion of something that we already do. Let’s talk about diaeresis. No, it’s not a kidney treatment or a bowel complaint, it is the name for those two dots you find, for example, above the i in naive. (16:51) This often gets confused with the two dots you find in a lot of German words, the umlaut, but actually it’s different. An umlaut serves to change the sound of the vowel it’s positioned over. But diaeresis serves another purpose. It tells you then when two vowels are positioned next to each other, you sound each of them out rather than merge them into a single vowel sound. It’s what makes this na-ive rather than nave or nive. (17:19) French uses diaeresis much more than we do. Their word for canoe is canoë. Their word for maize is maïs. And you find it in French names like Zoë or Gaël or Maël. In English, you generally only find it in words of French origin, like naive or Noël. However, there is one place where you will see it used more widely and that is in the pages of The New Yorker. (17:48) Almost since the magazine’s inception they have stubbornly stuck to the style point of instead of writing cooperate just like that or with a hyphen, they should spell it like that to avoid anyone getting accidentally cooped up, I suppose. They use it words like re-elect too so that no-one is unwittingly left reeling. I like this. It looks better than the hyphen, which lets face it, is a bit of a bodge job anyway. (18:18) We don’t normally separate prefixes from the rest of the word. We don’t write it pre-fixes, do we? The New Yorker does say that its use of diaeresis is one of its biggest sources of reader complaints. But I think it’s elegant. Even the eyes of seasoned English speakers might need a second look at a word like reenter. (18:38) Let’s at least give non-native speakers a chance. I also think the word diaeresis could benefit from having a diaeresis too. So I say, let’s coop-t it further. Sorry, coöpt it further. (18:52) Now, just before we bask in the full glory of what we’ve achieved here today, I want to give an honourable mention to a couple of symbols that did not make the cut - this time, anyway. Firstly, let’s talk about tilde and the absolute blinder that it’s playing in the Spanish letter enye. Did you know this originally started out life as an extra n on top? It was used as a way of abbreviating a double N. (19:19) And so maybe we should consider a similar idea for cleaning up double letters in English? Or - as I have advocated in the past - we could just take enye wholesale and use it in words like union, onion or companion. We’ve just got to find a way of working this one in, I think. And I also want to give a shout-out to the caron, which is doing a brilliant job saving space. (19:41) It’s used to turn a c into ch and an s into a sh. That’s perhaps a čange we šould make too. But as I said up top, when I was still out in the freezing cold… [Rob outside] It is unbelievably cold out here. [Rob inside] …no adding or removing letters was allowed this time. We should be able to go through an existing text with a red pen and fix it right up. (20:04) So let’s stick with the six that I’ve already suggested. It’s time to bring the prèsėnt doub̆t to a clòse and coöperate for chānge. Start using these accents today. I hope you’ve enjoyed this introduction to the world of diacritics disguised as a call for wholesale reform of English orthography. If you did, I think you’re going to like this video too. (20:27) Or maybe this one. If you want more juicy language bites from me, check out my free newsletter and my Patreon. Links below. And I’ll see you in the next thing. Goodbye.