Why E̱NGLISH shoul̆d start ūsing accėnt màrks

[@RobWords]

What do you think? Can we add any more accents from other languages?🌍 Start speaking a new language in 3 weeks with Babbel 🎉 Get up to 60% OFF your subscription ➡Here: go.babbel.com/t?bsc=1200m60-youtube-robwords-jan-2024-promo&btp=default&KZbin&Influencer..Jan-2024..TATAM..newyearspromo&bclid={{creator_id}}

[@VizoMediaGroup]

Rob, I bet you could create a new language and do videos teaching us this new language

[@MoLauer]

I just think adding too many diacritics makes text looking cluttered and it might rather hinder fast reading than helping it. A spelling reform would be the better solution.

[@59Canuto]

@@MoLauer- I think that after adopting the convention, we would get rapidly used to it and sight read it with ease. The problem comes with the speed when we write with it.

[@duncankilburn7612]

Doesn't modern English have a couple of umlauts? Like 'naïve', etc.

[@TeoNikolov]

I just wonder how do we write bird with a dot. Do we put a dot over the dot or leave it like this?

[@smithpauld1501]

The overdot. I love it. This is so, so much better than simplified spelling or Shavian because the transition to it would be simpler. Warning: Geoff Lindsey will be coming after you over “the schwa is never stressed.”

[@RobWords]

Uh oh. But I bet an attack from him is charming.

[@SantiagoLopez-fq4eb]

​@@RobWords But even you put a dot on the stressed "o" in "brother", Rob!

[@stevetournay6103]

Hercules might too...

[@frederickwood9116]

How do other languages incorporate these “word decorations” into keyboard use and handwriting? They do make a lot of sense. Possibly just a few would be enough to solve the majority of our language madness. The whole lot starts to feel very busy.

[@oyoo3323]

​@@SantiagoLopez-fq4ebwell that's just it. That's not even a schwa, it's a strut-vowel. In fact, it is in most dialects.

[@investmentgammler4550]

As a non-native speaker, I invented a similar system years ago, to mark the pronunciation of english texts. Beside the macron, I also used the circumflex for long vowels, to distinguish between 'hōpe' and 'lôser', and between 'māke' and 'grâss'. To mark the [ʌ] sound, I used the caron (pǔtt vs. put); for the 'a' pronounced [ɔ], i used å (åll).

[@xav5376]

n8ce

[@AfterMath-e9e]

OR, you could use the 5-vowels system a as in father, e making the ay sound as in stay, i making the ee sound as in meet, o making the o sound as in hope, u making the oo sound as in root, and: Ää for apple (äpl) Ëë for else (ëls) Êê for other (êŧr) Ïï for it (ït) Öö for olive (ölïv) Üü for shook (šük) Ţţ for think (ţïŋk) Ŧŧ for the (ŧê) Šš for shake (šek)

[@WilliamAndrea]

"grass" for US English. It's part of the trap-bath split, so "fâther" is a more widely-recognizable example.

[@NeyamStar]

^ (Pronunciation is up) _ (keep the tone the same)

[@JuvStudios]

You don't need these. The silent e itself indicates the long pronunciation of a (é-like) and o. The usual convention is that when a constant is placed in between two vowels, the first vowel is to be pronounced by the name of the letter. Now, it is a little harder to read compared to simply having a diacritic on the vowel but if this convention were consistent, it would not be a big deal. The problem this convention is not consistently followed; for example, give is not pronounced gaiv. live (verb) and live (noun, as in a live stream on KZbin) is another example, where the convention is applied for one meaning but not for the other.

[@magnusbergqvist2123]

People often think that the "funny" letters we have in Swedish: Å Ä Ö, are just variants of A and O, as if we were using umlauts. They are not. They are in fact separate wovels, and placed last in the alphabet so we have 29 letters in the alphabet (used to be counted as only 28, as W were considered to be a version of V, and not a letter of its own).

[@HenryLoenwind]

That's because they don't know the difference between an umlaut and an accented letter. The latter is just any letter with any accent mark. The former is a regular sound change for plurals, past forms, and the like. So "goose->geese" or "mouse->mice" is an umlaut. I think this got muddled because the German umlauts are both, and as such, the letters got named "a umlaut" etc. in English.

[@allanrichardson1468]

Canadian has 27 letters; Zed is followed by Eh. /jk 😊

[@stevieinselby]

Much like in Spanish, until fairly recently 'ch', 'll', 'ñ' and 'rr' were treated as distinct letters and I believe dictionaries treated them as following c, l, n and r respectively, so for example "coche" would come _after_ "cocuyo". (My Spanish/English dictionary, which is about 25 years old, after the "C" section has a page headed "CH" that notes that words beginning with Ch are "now" found in amongst the C's, which suggests it was a new thing at the time).

[@santumChannelYes]

@@stevieinselby Extremely minor correction from a Spanish speaker: Ñ is still considered a standalone letter, probably because that ~ doesn't appear above any other letters so we see it as part of an unit. You're correct about everything else however!

[@UltimateHammerBro]

​@@stevieinselby I've had a quick look and the change was officially made in 1994 (only for ch and ll, ñ has never stopped being a separate letter), and there are people who still talk about them as being distinct letters. In fact, it appears that the two standards co-existed for some time. Until recently, Windows offered two different language options for Spanish, the only difference between them being whether ch and ll were considered separate letters when it came to alphabetical order.

[@ChampyonHampterGaming]

That’s geniüs and simple enough to apply! Very entertaining, thanks

[@extremegameplays7404]

Genyus.

[@SomeLilGuyMeow]

Geni-us

[@AdrianDalyellMakesAnime]

Vats jinyoos end simpol inuf too aplay! Very enterteyning tenyks!

[@themelancholyofgay3543]

gènius

[@moondust2365]

I feel like this could be done for people learning a language through textbooks as a pronunciation guide, rather than implemented everywhere, sorta like with Filipino (we technically have accent marks and diacritics, but they're only really used in certain textbooks and dictionaries, rarely irl).

[@TheUniverso_sky]

Sim seriauma boa ideia, igual o bopomofo é usado no mandarim taiwanês

[@DCMAKER133]

Japan has a similiar thing for children learning one of the version of Japanese. I forget which it is.

[@TheUniverso_sky]

@@DCMAKER133 Em japonês eles tem 3 alfabetos o kanji que é igual ao chinês, e o katakana e hiragana que são fonéticos. Eles são todos mesclados entre si quando se escreve frases.

[@DCMAKER133]

@@TheUniverso_sky I know that but on some documents they put a 2nd row of text above to help children who are still learning the written language. I can't recall what it's called or if it's part of katakana or hiragana. Or maybe it was hiragana written above katakana that I am thinking of.

[@mangoperson9174]

​@@DCMAKER133when you write hiragana spellings over kanji, it's called Furigana

[@billradford2128]

I simply absorbed English as a child without really knowing the rules. Then aged 60 I learned to speak basic Mandarin (a lesson every day for 5 years from Chinese University students!) and the world changed. Then I went to China to teach English at high school when my ignorance of my language was exposed as my admiration for my students increased. English is much harder to master than Mandarin if you ignore the characters. I can understand a little Maori as most can in NZ (they also use the macron) but learning Mandarin has changed my life as you so rightly say. Keep up the good work.

[@askadia]

Thank you for sharing your experience, sir 😙

[@ReportsOnChina]

Yup, Māori also uses the macron to signify elongated vowels. Mana and māna are completely different pronunciations and meanings. 😊 Mandarin uses accents to signify different tones, but that’s another story.

[@TryinaD]

Exactly. This new proposed system reminds me of the Chinese sheng diao diacritics for Pinyin, and it definitely is easier for me to read English!

[@jc31312jch]

Mandarin and Cantonese speaker here, you are absolutely right. Indeed, English is harder.

[@Alphabunsquad]

I think English is a lot easier than its reputation but Chinese in general is a very easy language. It’s just so foreign to us with so many strange sounds that are difficult to hear for us that it takes a long time to learn. But when you compare English to fusion synthetic languages like Ukrainian or Latin you start to see just how easy of a language English is.

[@Okoespjpop]

As both a spanish and french speaker, I truly appreciate attention on the grave accent. Both french and spanish do differenciate between same-written words just by placing a little accent, and I've always thought that it would be a truly useful thing in english

[@encycl07pedia-]

The words estas and estás are not written the same way. The (lack of) diacritics make them written differently. Diacritics help pronunciation (a temporary problem for a few people) at the cost of writing efficiency (a permanent sacrifice for every English writer). It's an awful idea. The average writing and typing speed of the English-speaking world would drop dramatically in order to facilitate and integrate these new characters. The letter "a" is much, much faster to type and still faster to write than "á." differentiate*

[@MiguelFarah]

Note also how, due to efficient rules, Spanish doesn't need two distinct diacritical marks: the acute accent serves both to mark the stress ("bastó" vs. "basto") and differing meanings of the same word ("Él te dio el té."). The latter is called is called "acento diacrítico".

[@pietergeerkens6324]

The accents in French simply stand in for consonants dropped from the originating Latin roots. That they also differentiate pronunciation (in Parisian French) is just a consequence.

[@Okoespjpop]

@@encycl07pedia- I don't know if you are a spanish speaker, but you took an awful example. Sure, "estas" and "estás" are pronounced very differenly, but you're forgetting about "el"/"él", "si"/"sí", "tu"/"tú", "mi"/"mí". Sure, we only have one accent visually, but there are three different uses for it, "acento diacrítico", "acento ortográfico" and "acento dierético". You gave an example of the "acento ortográfico", and that wasn't what I was talking about.

[@bipolarminddroppings]

​@@pietergeerkens6324most French natives I know dont even bother when writing by hand, or informally. They do however use them when writing something down for me, a non native speaker...

[@roxdegabba]

That's right, everyone should learn a foreign language, it gives you insights you can never imagine being monolingual.

[@brightsideofmaths]

I have to say that this is indeed crazily efficient for learning. Reading a new text (for learning English) and immediately seeing the silent letters would save so much time!

[@Merluch]

As a native spanish (spanish is given as an example in this same video) speaker, when i read a spanish text i read it at exactly the same speed as if it had none. And spanish has only the ` tilde, it would likely be far slower if it had other tildes that changed the meaning of the word. It's not efficient at all.

[@brightsideofmaths]

You misunderstood my comment. I only meant that I would save time learning the language. Just having the markers in a text for learning the language would save me the time to check every pronunciation of a new word. And this a common thing you have to do in English because pronunciation is not directly given in the writing.@@Merluch

[@rafaelmijares369]

Not just for people learning English but for native speakers as well. I'm thinking about Margerie Taylor Green's pronunciation of "indicted". 😅

[@Merluch]

@@brightsideofmaths learning a language is something temporal and personal, having to write down spelling is permanent and universal.

[@Merluch]

@@rafaelmijares369 spelling doesn't matter in that case. You still understand she said indicted. There are wackier spellings in other english dialects.

[@roaneriks]

As a Dutch, I can say that you actually pronounced "een" and "één" really well👏🏼

[@jojogirn6076]

Ugh nobody cares

[@MerryGoldberry]

@@jojogirn6076 Oh, come now! I care, and roaneriks cares, and it's easily possible that Rob cares. But I don't care for your comment. Was it really necessary, even though you have the ability?

[@infrakazos]

@@jojogirn6076 I care. You can leave now.

[@DerEchteBold]

@@jojogirn6076 This is a language channel, who doesn't care?!

[@jasonyones5103]

​@@jojogirn6076you cared enough to comment that no one cares, use a damn common sense

[@user-mrfrog]

I wish English would bring back eth (ð) and thorn (þ). I am learning Icelandic and find these letters useful in distinguishing the two th sounds!

[@alanbarnett718]

I also have a tendre for those two, but I see two difficulties. First is that in pre-Caxton English they were interchangeable - the word "the" had a voiced theta sound, but was conventionally spelled with a thorn rather than an eth. Doing it any other way now looks funny, probably because of all those "Ye Olde Teashoppe" signs. So reviving both seems a bit redundant. The other reason is that they are both so bloody difficult to write, for a modern penman. How do you keep the thorn from looking like a p? An if eth looped the same way round as a 6 it would be easy - but it doesn't!

[@user-mrfrog]

@@alanbarnett718 Icelanders have no problems using these letters. I do agree about your first remark on "ye".

[@mbdg6810]

I am learning Icelandic too and found this very interesting.

[@Polyglot85to90]

Interesting to note that ð is completely silent in Faroese 🇫🇴

[@eff9266]

Let's merge t and h together. Some ligature. We take the horizontal line from t and add to h. And get the voiced ð sound: ħ. And a backwards ħ would mean voiceless sound. Horizontally or vertically mirrored. Or, we leave ð as the voiced and use ħ as the unvoiced. I ħink ðat wið suç system ðe spelliñ kud bekom raðer effektiv.

[@marcopanzironi6612]

The Roman Alphabet isn’t rubbish, It’s just that it’s intended for its original language: Latin.

[@raylightbown4968]

In my retirement I've taken on the role of a teacher of English as a foreign language.. I commend your efforts, as my students lament that "live" (I live in Thailand) and "live" (live performance) or "read" (I can read English) and "read" (I have read that book) are frustrating - along with all the other random vagaries of spelling and pronunciation.

[@marflitts]

Dog lead/lead (Pb)

[@khunphraeokha]

🇹🇭

[@jssamp4442]

These are called heteronyms and they always bedevil those learning English, even as a first language.

[@MiguelFarah]

FUN FACT: besides the diaeresis over the letter u rule ("agüero", "pingüino"), Spanish *also* uses the diaeresis over the letter i, to mark a syllable separation, as you describe ("hïato" instead of "hiato", for example). It is *very* seldomly seen, however, as it is exceedingly rare to need the mark; people will intuitively know the difference OR the separation will be made explicit by an acute accent on the last letter ("Mi pie." vs. "Yo pié.").

[@RobWords]

I didn't know that! Thanks

[@patrickcorliss8878]

@@RobWords Very professionally done as usual. There is a problem with the hyphen - although very short it is still too long. In the UK we have traditionally used a numeric decimal point at mid-height which I understand is called "midline" as in 23·4. However most people put the decimal point on the floor as in 23.4 probably because the is no mid-point on the keyboard. What about using a midline decimal point instead of a hyphen as in co·operative or mid·field or ex·patriate or sixty·year·old person? It's much neater and better than a diaeresis (which we should call an umlaut as in German). Being so simple it would get used more often in questionable cases than a hyphen. [PS I's hard to judge in this present script because there's not too much difference]

[@benhetland576]

It appears also the 'ü' just as well is used to spell a /w/ sound, or maybe just in the /gw/ combination. A plain 'u' before 'e' or 'i' would otherwise only serve to harden the preceding consonant as in "guerra" .

[@peztopher7297]

@@patrickcorliss8878 I believe I've occasionally seen that midline dot to separate syllables. Separately, aren't there some languages that use commas and periods/full stops in numbers the opposite way? 2.000 for two thousand and 2,34 for two point three four?

[@m4rloncha]

Hello Miguel, In my Entire life as a Native Spanish speaker I have never seen another vowel in my language besides "u" with diaeresis. I needed to search for it and what you've said is half True, Half False. "Ï ï" used to be (Now it's not used and it's a rule not to be used like that) written when certain poets needed extra syllables in their poems so they were correct based on the poetic composition they have chosen. Such like: "No las francesas armas odïosas, en contra puestas del airado pecho..." (It keeps going. You can search the name like: "Garcilaso de la Vega, Soneto XVI". But it was also used in "Ü ü" without a "g" behind. Such like: "Qué descansada vida la del aquel que huye el mundanal rüido" (Fray Luis de León, I. Oda a la vida retirada) Both Garcilaso de la Vega and Fray Luis de León were from the XVI century, and after that you'll never see those uses for the diaeresis. So if you don't want to write poems, destroy the language so it fits the rules for the poetic composition you've chosen or sound like someone from ancient times.... Never use "Ï ï" and "Ü ü" only for "Gui" and "Gue" when you also want to pronounce the "u". And about "Pie" and "Pié": "Pie", it's a noun. "Pié", Old way to spell the "Primera persona del singular del pretérito perfecto simple de indicativo" of "Piar". But the "R.A.E." (Real Spanish Academy) discontinued it in 2010 and was replaced with just "Pie". Even if you find a conjugation with a diacritical mark for this verb, it will be "Píe" in the "Presente del Subjuntivo". So your example is not only incorrect but also useless for this.

[@martys9972]

I think that the 6 diacritical marks that you propose will be a tremendous help to those learning English as a second language. I have tutored a Vietnamese person, and she was frequently baffled by the way that certain words were pronounced. I don't think that it will catch on for regular publications, however. A similar feature exists in Russian, in which emphasized syllables are accented in grammar books, but omitted in regular publications.

[@RubenMoor]

Given the fact that pinyin is an invaluable tool for learning Chinese, an english spelling with diacritics might actually be very helpful just for teaching purposes. My English teachers just glossed over this kind of stuff. I remember how I was fascinated by the following entry in the conjugation table of my English book read read read Three homographs, two homonyms, three different meanings. After years of actually speaking English, I still stumbled over English weirdness. This really makes the language unnecessary difficult.

[@B0K1T0]

The Vietnamese took it a bit far though 😅 (at least how Vietnamese writing looks to me, without any knowledge of that languange)

[@05degrees]

@@B0K1T0 IMO that’s because of tones. There are two major options when marking tones in languages with them: using diacritics or using silent letters, both can look weird.

[@05degrees]

Also about accents in Russian: there’s a similar feature regarding the letter ё (yo, representing /o/ after palatalized consonants and /jo/ in several other cases) which for the sake of I can’t fathom who can be replaced by the letter е (ye, more or less the same for /e/ and /je/). It’s obligatory to use ё in language learning materials but almost never anywhere else: the rule states that it should be used only in proper names, or if the spelling is otherwise confusing with another word (like _все_ ‘all.PL’ vs. _всё_ ‘all.N.SG’, but many write _все_ in all contexts anyway), or if the word is so rare that it would be read incorrectly (like toponyms). I find this garbage because it’s not as if it would be in any way more economical to omit the diaeresis, nor is it significantly simpler to type (there’s an issue that ё is usually located at the same key the tilde is in most of QWERTY layouts, and that’s bad but the damn letter still can be typed in and it’s not that frequent to fuss over). And what’s more, this conservative rule is not even much followed in practice. This inertia or laziness stems from folk status of ё as a half-letter (despite being taught in schools that it’s a regular letter) which is in part due to this letter being forked from е just a couple+ centuries ago, despite the sound change happened earlier but was deemed colloquial and low-register for a while. Because of appearing first due a very regular sound change, nowadays in most cases ё is still somewhat redundant because the contexts of this sound change in native words are still easily recognized. But after being introduced, ё found uses outside those contexts, and using the letter in those is a very much separate matter. And then, being systematic and using ё in all contexts looks like the simplest thing to do, but noooo. (Also as Swedish letter å was invented at almost the same time or earlier, I would be glad if ё was instead е̊, because then it would better show how it’s read, but alas. Using diaeresis in this way is IMO very weird-but who am I to argue with Karamzin, bah. People would want to write е̊ even less than they’re content with writing ё right now.) Hope my rant wasn’t too unbearable. I type/write all of the ё letters in my conversations and I can’t fathom why people are against that too much. (I sorta get why they don’t want to write stress accents on each word, but writing ё would be needed way less often.) But despite weird words occurring rarely, they do so often enough to catch me time to time. Also it’s not even the full picture of the literary language being shameful of using ё: there are cases of using йо and ьо instead of ё for various reasons which again I personally find a historical mess which could and should be simplified. Oh orthographies! Also, references: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(Cyrillic) Probably more useful than my rant. 🙂

[@michaelbaker3841]

I agree that it would make ESL much easier. As an additions, using diacritical marks in text would substantially improve text-to-voice and voice-to-text applications, increasingly common in translations. And a greatly expanded table of such marks would be useful for the numerous English variants and accents.

[@lornalafontaine6434]

I like all your videos, but this one is perhaps my favorite because I have thought of this ever since I was a young child learning English in my Spanish speaking country. I started using the Spanish accent symbols then to help me with the English pronunciation and I still do sometimes when learning new challenging words. I am a senior lady now but as we all know, learning new vocabulary is a never ending joy. Thank you for all the effort and information in your videos, you are a great teacher.

[@EdwinMartin]

Being Dutch, this totally makes sense 🙂 In Dutch, you always know how to pronounce a word just by reading it. (There are some rare exceptions). Quite different from English 😄

[@marflitts]

We have a town in England called Reading which I suppose is differentiated by the capitalised R but is pronounced redding.

[@MusicalRadiation]

​@@marflitts but there stil is no orthographic distinction between 'read' and 'read'. How do you know if 'I read a book' is in present tense or past tense?

[@marflitts]

@@MusicalRadiation Very true

[@aperson1]

What would you say the most misleading word in Dutch is to pronounce? Or at least any particularly crazy ones that come to mind.

[@heikozysk233]

@@aperson1 If you never looked up Dutch pronounciation and you're not able to make a proper Spanish "J" sound, I think you may find a lot of words that can be challenging like geen, uitschakelen, goed.. or place names like Nijmegen, Scheveningen, Den Haag (The Hague), .. and probably also the place where you'll start your trip to the Netherlands, Schipol airport ;-)

[@hisham_hm]

10:10 so cute that you listed Spanish syllables using the English separation rules (i.e. corBATa, aspiraDORa instead of corBAta, aspiraDOra) -- as someone who struggled to understand English syllables at first, it's fun to see that the confusion goes both ways!

[@Jagm3854]

I hated so much when I had to separate syllables in 7th grade beacuse of this (1st language is Spanish).

[@caseyhamm4292]

i find this incredibly fascinating as i took 3 years of spanish and never personally collided with this problem. personally, señora hache told me if i could just roll my r’s it would solve me woes (i never did lol)

[@hisham_hm]

@@caseyhamm4292 it only really matters when writing and nowadays with text in computers it's rare to see hyphenated text as we used to see in printed books. Case in point: KZbin comment lines are not justified, so the computer has no need to maximize their length using hyphenation.

[@hisham_hm]

@@caseyhamm4292 it only really matters when writing (you won't really think of the rules when reading) and nowadays with text in computers it's rare to see hyphenated text as we used to see in printed books or when writing in notebooks.

[@SuviTuuliAllan]

English separation rules? Don't American and British English have different rules, too… BTW should we all throw in soft hyphens when writing on computers? Is it justified? (was that a pun‽)

[@BasicallyBaconSandvichIV]

"Both of which I I'm sure I pronounced very badly." He said after perfectly pronouncing een (the number) like a native!

[@darinlawyer5432]

YES!!!😃😃 Exactly!!👏👏👏 I had thought about that myself-some years back. At least by doing so, it would return English to its-more Germanic origin. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this tutorial. 🙂

[@extendedsilence]

eww no, please don't try to make english more germanic now. (actually I've sometimes thought it would be brilliant to scrub german through a period of being spoken (badly?) by the vikings, danes, normans, celts, etc in order to erode/minimize all the declensions, cases, grammatical genders, and other grammatical features) 🤪

[@Alex-eg8qr]

I'm a native Turkish speaker and I learned English as a second language and I'm glad my language inspired you! English is easy to learn, hard to master, and with all these silent letters pronouncing it is a nightmare. Using accent marks is a very cool idea!

[@Kabukkafa]

İnanmıyorum.

[@Kabukkafa]

Alex ne knk o zaman

[@Samirustem]

I am not native speaker of turkish. My turkish sounds as similar to turkish that know one ever noticed i am not from turkey but this is first time i am hearing this rule about ğ. In my native azerbaijani we do have sound for ğ and its pretty much same sound that turkish people make. I do not think ğ is just silent g. Sometimes it is silen ğ and peole special from western turkey drop ğ. They say erdoan elongating o but not always. In eastern turkey people do make sound that corresponds to azerbaijani ğ. To me ğ is just one of thouse sounds in turkish you have to know how much to use it in different words.

[@Alex-eg8qr]

@@Kabukkafa abi full ismimi niye kullaniyim hiç nick diye bişi duydun mu

[@bestcommentyoutube]

to be honest this is just in my opinion 😅 but as a person with the native language also doesn’t use accent mark, it’ll be overwhelming to learn english with it.

[@thecosplaycrafter8017]

This wrīting systėm makes so much more sense than our cụrrėnt systėm. Bravo, sir.

[@loyellow1]

You forgot the accent on the W to show it is silent.

[@thecosplaycrafter8017]

@@loyellow1 My bad. There actually isn't an option to put that accent on w.

[@durjam3734]

what is bravo? you mean brāvō?

[@obwill]

From a Welsh perspective: We use circumflexes to indicate long vowels when they'd otherwise be short. Grave accents are used to indicate vowels that are short when they would otherwise be long - mostly in loanwords. The acute accent is used in two ways - firstly to indicate a stressed final syllable and secondly on a w to show it's to be pronounced as a vowel and not a glide. Finally, diaeresis is used to show that two vowels are pronounced separately rather than as a diphthong.

[@tbuyus8328]

This is something similar I've worked on. It is done using a pronunciation lexicon I created from the CMU pronunciation dictionary, a lot of data mangling, and turned into javascript code. Here the circumflexes are used when vowels take the sound of their names, i.e. thé âpè Êvè, îçý côld, ûśèd thé hand wårmer: MŶ FĀTHER MEETS THÉ CAT One-wőnè côld rainý day when mŷ fāther wáś-woś a littlè boy, hê met an ôld allêy cat on hiś street. Thé cat wáś-woś verý drippý and uncómfòŕtáblè sô mŷ fāther sãìd, "Wōūldn't yöü lîkè tó/tö cőmè hômè with mê?" This surprîśèd thé cat-shê had never bėforè met anyone-ãnýwőnè whö cãrèd ábout ôld allêy cats-but shê sãìd, "Î'd bê verý much óblîĝèd if Î cōūld sit bŷ a wårm furnáçè, and perhaps havè a sauçer of-uv milk." "Wê havè a verý nîçè furnáçè tó/tö sit bŷ," sãìd mŷ fāther, "and Î'm ŝūrè mŷ mőther haś an extrá sauçer of-uv milk." I've got some books online but I can't post the links in here. Above is an excerpt from My Father's Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannet. The books allow you to customise the way the formatting is added.

[@nyuh]

i love how youre not just willy nilly assigning jobs to diacritics but youre also looking at how theyre used in other languages. trying to reform english spelling is almost impossible but at least now ive learned a few more things about some glyphs

[@mbdg6810]

I always thought adding some vowels worked best but I probably could rethink that after this video.

[@Lokrio9]

As a native speaker of portuguese, I never noticed english's accent problem until I saw it in the internet, like in your videos, Rob. But I have to say it: I really enjoyed this idea; hopefuly it will get traction. 😊

[@Bolpat]

In my fair opinion, English should absolutely go back to the roots and reïntroduce Ð ð and Þ þ.

[@InventorZahran]

Ðogecoin

[@ThatDutchAnimator]

Yes, I for some reason love the ( I couldn't find the letter )

[@Bolpat]

@@ThatDutchAnimator Which one? 1. Ï ï 2. Ð ð 3. Þ þ

[@ZoghdanOfficial]

Agreed

[@jackthehacker05]

Yesss a fellow diaeresis user!!! Respect!

[@sford]

Rob, I can't thank you enough for your videos. Language is something that interests me on a level I cannot even say - While I'm not fluent-conversational in Spanish or Swedish, I can watch videos in either language and understand about 90% of what's being said. I appreciate your work and analsyses on so many language issues. Carry on, please.

[@mozzapple]

Fun fact: the silent "K"s in words like "knight", "knife", or "know" weren't always silent. You used to pronounce the K, but somewhere along the way we got lazy and decided to drop the K sound.

[@digimonlover1632]

It’s better that we did that. Pronouncing the K is weird and awkward.

[@snoopyguy21]

I was watching a film in Swedish and they were pronounding the K in knife. Also Portuguese words pronounce the silent letters like psychology. So it sounds like pee-see-co-lo-ga. Maybe I'm used to it but I like it because it's written how it sounds.

[@Cri_Jackal]

​​@@snoopyguy21 I'm pretty sure the "psi" in psychology is originally pronounced _exactly_ how it's spelled, it's a Greek letter. It's just like how the K in knight wasn't originally silent, you make a P sound then immediately break into an S and then a long I, like saying "pssst" to get someone's attention, except the T is replaced with "sigh". In fact, the very term "psychology" is entirely Greek, the transliteration of the original spelling would be "psykhelogia", original spelling being "Ψυχολογία". Ψ

[@angelavonhalle5144]

German has retained some of the Ks, Like in Knie = Knee. You didn't mention it, but if you learned English and French, learning German is like a breeze.

[@MicahPachirisuGuy]

kenite kenife kenowu

[@kayemm_86]

When your mic cut out, I thought it was my Bluetooth connection 😂

[@tonybalogna123]

I did too! Turned my headphones on and off a couple times haha.

[@Calvin35]

I was about to ask if anyone else had this problem😂

[@youxianz]

same

[@breadshovel]

REAL

[@EzraPlutoCharles]

I'm on my laptop and thought my corded earbuds finally cut out.

[@MilProductions]

I recently found your channel and I’m obsessed with it, you even helped me learn some German words that I never knew!

[@Nyan_Kitty]

Our company (I'm in Austria) recently got those Renault "Zoe" cars. Before we had our Umlaute, we used "e" after the vowel to change it. So I just love to call those tiny tin cans "Zö" and everyone hates me for it 😂

[@stephenremington8448]

More taking and degrading of Greek words, Zoe is Ζωὴ, not Ζω. Reminds of western maths people taking the Greek π, spelled πι, and calling it pie, when the correct pronounciation is same as English P. At least not as bad as using a Greek Goddess for running shoes, or stealing the Greek alphabet to use as a virus list. Maybe another good reason for, as I previously suggested, using in the English alphabet, η for the long ee sound, respectfully correct usage.

[@KernelLeak]

Demnächst: GI Jö Actionfiguren beim Billa... :D

[@erikziak1249]

@@KernelLeak LOL der war gut.

[@Idkpleasejustletmechangeit]

@@stephenremington8448 I think that was a joke. It's a haha about how "Zoe" would be read the same as "Zö" in German. Nothing about thinking that that's how it's actually pronounced.

[@benlee6158]

When I was working at the supermarket (in Germany), the...well...not so linguistically educated colleagues always mispronounced "Moët"🍾. "Haben wir noch Möööt im Lager?"😂

[@jonathangould189]

14:54 Ironically, while the 4 meanings listed include; 1. 'a gift', 2. 'now (current time)', 3. 'present a prize', 4. 'pre-sent (sent before)', There are also more nuanced definitions, such as 'here (current place, ie, "I'm present.")', or the difference in adjectives and nouns (eg, being present in the present). So while the addition of the accent marks helps differentiate some of the definitions apart, it still isn't foolproof, and unless we want to keep adding multiple graves to denote the potential 3rd or 4th definition of a word that is spelt and pronounced the same, it unfortunately doesn't solve the whole problem, and has the potential to add even more confusion.

[@doigt6590]

It mostly solves it, not completely (and it's impossible to completely solve as you rightly point out) but it's better than nothing. It always baffles me how people prefer no solution to a mostly working solution just because "it doesn't solve everything" and then they go on to live their live the worse way possible.

[@jerrybfowler4407]

I am in my late 70s and grew up in a community of mixed Mexican and White Midwest Americans in Santa Fe, NM. The school had a constant battle just getting about 80% of the student body to speak English and that problem rubbed off on us white students. I am a voracious reader, even in grade school and early on used a dictionary to find the meaning of words but could never understand the symbols for pronunciation of the word since my classmate spoke a different langue. Your new symbols would be an immense help to me even now. My ignorance of pronunciation has greatly held me back in life, I sounded so ignorant at times when speaking or reading from the written word.

[@fibanocci314]

I have seen a quote attributed to different very smart people that says "never judge someone for mispronouncing a word they learned from reading." Also, if it helps, my worst personal example of this is that I thought "Penelope" was pronounced similar to "envelope" and was mercilessly teased for if.

[@Duquedecastro]

Very interesting! It’s too bad they didn’t take a bilingual approach. (By the way, my family is from Zacatecas, Mexico and I found that my ancestor who was born not 40 miles from my grandparents birthplace, was the founder of Santa Fe in 1598).

[@6kids3cats]

@@fibanocci314I read it in an encyclopedia at age 8. Thought it was pen lope.

[@dmilgate2713]

We have used the breve, macron and grave in the U.S. for a long time in American dictionaries and grade school for pronunciation guides. Like your suggestion, macron has indicated the long vowel sound. The breve, however, has signified the short sound, as in cat, pet, bit, pot and nut. Dictionaries have used the grave to indicate syllable stress, placed over the pertinent vowel. I often use these the same way when tutoring English with non-native learners. I like the idea of using an accent for that better than my habit of using a forward slash through silent consonants.

[@TonyWilson615]

Great video, Rob! I speak Brazilian Portuguese as my second language, and when I first started learning a few years ago, it only took 1-2 lessons before I had the same thought. "Why don't we use accents like this in English too?" Portuguese's use of the grave accent is particularly cool: it's a contraction. So, I could say "Vou a a praia (I'm going to the beach)," but those double A's look ugly. So instead, you can combine them! "Vou à praia." I love it.

[@rupertorgan7749]

I love this idea! Over the last forty-odd years I've studied six European languages and that experience has made me very aware of the shortcomings of the English language, in particular the way it is written and pronounced. It desperately needs tidying up!

[@OriOfTangleWood]

I love when you discuss english in relation to other languages. I went down a fun linguistic rabbit hole when you called a haček a caron. Always learning new things! What a fun video! Thanks Rob!

[@lyn9cook]

Hi from the Gold Coast Australia

[@alanalmo5834]

Love it. I have family brought up in France and they just cannot comprehend how we, for example, pronounce "Leicester". I spoke to a French nephew and he had to correct me by telling me Leicester was really Le-sester-shire. 😄😄

[@Hamzo-Does-Nothing23]

I love the Irish “fada” which literally translates to long. It’s put on vowels to make the sound longer. (á, é, í, ó, ú)

[@leta5034]

It is also put on vowels to change the way that every single letter around it sounds and make my life miserable as I attempt to learn irish

[@docteurcuicui582]

This is the easy part. The trigraph "aoi" in Irish is not consistent : for example, is is pronounced "ee" in "Taoiseach", but pronounced "uh" in the first name of the actress Saoirse Ronan (IPA symbols are hard to type)

[@user-jf1kd6fi1q]

I love this! I teach English to 7, 8 and 9 year olds in New Zealand and I immediately saw the value in your fabulous idea... learning English is so hard for all the reasons you have stated, and more, I'm very keen to support your accent campaign 👍 Here in NZ we have Te Reo, the language of our Maori people and it uses the macron to lengthen vowel sounds which then can completely change the meaning of the word. Languages are certainly fascinating. Thank you for your channel, I've been enjoying your videos for some time, I'm just not someone who comments often. Much Love (two words that would benefit from your accent system, I just need to remember which ones go where 😂) xxB 💖🇳🇿

[@JackHolt4658]

When does the accent campaign start?

[@tbuyus8328]

@@JackHolt4658 I've created a dictionary that associates sounds to letters (not just words to transcriptions - it is more granular) and associated code that adds similar formatting automatically. Get in touch if you are interested. Comments with links to some of this work get deleted unfortunately.

[@angelavonhalle5144]

My first language was Portuguese, where there exist several of the ideas you suggest (but using different types of accents). Brazilians and Portuguese from Europe are always discussing spelling and often disagreeing on the accents. As for your suggestions I had hoped you had shown multiple texts with your transformations. Foreign language students of English have often thought some of these innovations would be good, but then again, learning to read and write English wouldn't be so much fun. It's fun to guess, and you get used it in the end. It took me some time to see that stream is really tongue in cheek.

[@enzogamerukbr]

Portuguese mentioned

[@desiderioelielton2051]

Por mim, voltariamos á orthographia anterior á reforma dos annos 40.

[@angelavonhalle5144]

@@desiderioelielton2051 Eu gosto de pharmacia e theatro, pela semelhança com o inglês, mas "anno" com dois Ns ultrapassa meu limite.

[@desiderioelielton2051]

@ , a semelhança é com o grego translitterado pelos escriptores latinos.

[@jello7177]

Native portuguese speaker too, Mozambique Can you elaborate on how EU and BR are always disagreeing on spelling and accents. I thought it was clear that brazillian portuguese was a bit different than european, why discuss or disagree?😂. Plus the language is from protugal howcome they want to argue about it😭 Sei lá não faz muito sentido

[@bobbyshearer93]

Randomly found your channel and I love it! I've watched a few videos now, we should all be interested in where our words come from and you present really well. Accents would definitely make English easier for new speakers

[@TheLobsterCopter5000]

The problem with the stressing thing is that different dialects and versions of English put stress on different syllables, For example, in British English, the stressed syllable in "allele" is the first one, but in American English it's the second.

[@laurencefraser]

Not that much of an issue, we already have a bunch of other words that are randomly spelled differently in the US due to nationalist nonsense, or pronounced nonsensically in Brtiain because... reasons. And that's before you get into the Actual dialects (of which the USA has plenty but Britian has an absolute excess... and then there's the rest of the English speaking world). Just mark the spelling variant the same way you do for any other word affected by that split. More importantly, which syllable is stressed strongly influences the pronunciation of the entire rest of the word, and the stress pattern is often the only difference between two closely related words (generally a noun/verb, noun/adjective, etc. pair.)

[@Liggliluff]

Having different spellings for different regions is fine :)

[@paulnew2]

@@Liggliluff Yes, maybe it could even be beneficial: in a novel, when different characters spoke, we could "hear" their accents in our heads.

[@WOKEchair]

American English and British English fighting over who is the worst one while the rest just exist

[@Liggliluff]

​@@paulnew2That's so true. Sometimes I just want to write a certain accent and there's not really a convenient way of doing it.

[@kikivoorburg]

I’ve always been a fan of indicating diaeresis, though my personal solution-of-choice in most cases is an interpunct: Co·operate Re·elect Pre·emptive It’s intuitive to those who already use the hyphen, but less intrusive. It also avoids the confusion with German umlaut. Also, if we expand the rule from “pronounce the vowel separately” to “pronounce each half separately” you can use this to distinguish acronyms that act like a “word” from those that act like a “series of letters”: RADAR, LASER, NASA, etc. wouldn’t use dots, while a·k·a, i·e, U·S·A, etc. would use them! For aesthetic reasons, some loan words may not need to use this bc it looks “wrong”. For example I think Zo·e looks weird when compared to Zoë. “Na·ive” too is a bit strange. I think it’s ok to make an exception for loan words because there we’re using the _original language’s vowels_ (naïve isn’t pronounced “nah-I’ve” after all).

[@judithstrachan9399]

I thought naive was pronounced nah-eve but ny-eve seems to be more common. (Although they do sound similar when said quickly.)

[@judithstrachan9399]

Speaking of acronyms, I read about a computer professor who was accused by a stranger of knowing nothing because because he said S-E-O instead of see-oh. We need those dots!

[@kikivoorburg]

@@judithstrachan9399 interesting, not sure I’ve ever heard that version but it does sound similar in quick conversation so maybe it just escaped my ear

[@kikivoorburg]

@@judithstrachan9399 oo, that’s a fun anecdote to explain why the distinction matters! I expect the professor had a good laugh about that conversation afterwards

[@sth.777]

I grew up in Kansas; in our school, we used the macron and the breve over vowels to signify the long vowel and the short vowel, respectively. It was a spelling and pronunciation-learning technique.

[@nifflergaming8922]

As a german person that learned english and french, accent marks would be hell. English was pretty easy to learn, you just figure out hiw to pronnounce something like knight. French on the other hand, instead of just learning the word: l'ecole, you have to remember if it starts with e, é, è or ê. Accents make spelling harder.

[@hans-petermaidhof]

Das Gegenteil ist richtig.

[@tenaoconnor7510]

I’ve always wondered why we don’t use those marks 🤔 I think we should. Also I think some of the silent letters in words tell you context like the K in knight differentiates it from night. Same pronunciation but different meanings. English is an odd mix of everyone’s language and spelling 😵‍💫

[@maxturgidson568]

I don’t know…. Spoken chinese is much much worse and is rarely a problem. Even written Chinese has that problem to a limited extent and it’s just not an issue. Could all languages be burdened with rules to make it more clear? Sure, but it adds more rules to learn kind of killing the benefit. Look at all those folk that would rather type in English than their native language due to their problems with typing

[@friendlyfire7861]

No way, spelling is hard enough already. No need.

[@zidane8452]

Read and read

[@brauljo]

@@friendlyfire7861 it's hard because it's so bad, diacritics would make it better

[@encycl07pedia-]

Okay. Now type that comment using those diacritics and then tell me how much better it is. Or just write it down by hand. All it does is sacrifice usability, efficiency, and speed in order to help people who don't know any better pronounce words... and they still have to learn what the diacritics mean anyway. Meanwhile the rest of the English-writing world has to get carpal tunnel syndrome to accommodate them. I remember how much of a chore just typing enye in Spanish papers was (as evident that I'd rather spell out the word and this notation rather than type the character itself). I'd go and just copy/paste it from a web search. And that method doesn't work well with accented vowels in Spanish. Adding diacritics to English is a horrible idea in practice.

[@ruemeese]

The nice thing is it would be relatively easy for software to do automatically as we type (or to apply to existing texts). After all, the software watching over our typing already understands the gramma of each sentence and so could usually distinguish which variant of a homograph was in play.

[@RealSvensational]

I wasn't aware of the tilde originating from a second 'n', and it makes so much sense now. Thank you for that ^^ It did remind me of the å in nordic languages, where the ring also started as the second 'a' (in aa) that moved above the first one and ultimately was simplified to a circle. Now I wonder if there are even more diacritics that originate from doubled letters...

[@baumgrt]

Not a double letter, but the two dots in German Ä, Ö and Ü started out as an E written above those vowel letters. In old handwriting (Kurrent), the lowercase e looked a bit like a mirrored N, of which the outer, downward lines were emphasised much more when written with a quill. When stuck on top of another letter, it would eventually degrade into two short lines or dots. That’s also the reason why to this day, ö can be replaced by oe etc. if for some reason the proper letter isn’t available.

[@baumgrt]

@@BrayanAbelino I don’t think the E is closely related to the pronunciation. In standard pronunciation, ö sounds like /ø/ or /œ/, ü sounds like /y/ or /Y/, with long vowels being more open, whereas ä doesn’t have its own sound, but sounds like open /e/ (as in English let, men)

[@DanielBerke]

Not a double letter, but ancient Greek has the iota subscript, a tiny iota ("ι") written underneath a vowel to indicate where one originally was after it; over time pronunciation changed and the iotas became silent, but were still retained in spelling as subscripts. According to Wikipedia it still shows up in a few rare instances today.

[@davidberlant5096]

German has an extra letter representing a double s (ss). It is called an 'ess-tzet' and looks like a fancy capital B.

[@FanoWarFan]

As an america I can see how many problems this solves as well as the differences in which how you speak and I speak.

[@crooker2]

3:50 that was probably the smoothest and most professional segue to an interior shot due to technical difficulty that I have ever seen. Wow! Well done.

[@jeqsteaer]

It just cuts?

[@crooker2]

@@jeqsteaer a cut is a transition. Not a segue.

[@immortalsun]

How was that a segue?

[@peteymax]

In Irish we use accents (fada) and they make a huge difference and are really useful. For example sean is the Irish for old (pronounced shan) and Seán which means Jean/John/Jack and is pronounced shawn, then there’s orla which is vomit and Órla which is a girl’s name and means golden princess. There are many more such as lon a blackbird and lón which is lunch. The fada elongates the vowel and changes the word. We also have a dot over the letter g, today this is mainly represented as an h, this give lots of meanings such as possession. It sounds complicated but it’s very rule based and once you learn it you can pronounce just about any word. We don’t need double vowels or silent letters: oo is ú, ee is í, for example. Learning a foreign language is essential. Learning castellano has improved my Gaeilge (Irish) and inglés. When you pronounce the grave as grave as in terrible or a place to bury a body it sounds strange, I thought it was gráwve.

[@gravygood]

This is great! In another video you asked what we thought English was missing or should have and I said "diacritics!" I didn't know you had already done this video!

[@danisteffen-translations]

In Portuguese, we use the tilda only in vowels. And the tilda in vowels creates a nasal sound for the vowels A (for example, in the word PÃO - bread) and O (for example, in the word CORAÇÕES - hearts). Yes, we have other nasal vowels, usually those before M or N, as in the word MUITO, which is spoken as MUINTO. The nasal sound in N is present in Portuguese with the addition of an h in front of the consonant that should be nasal, as in GALINHA (chicken).

[@tonydai782]

The “~” symbol started out as a shorthand for “N”, so it makes sense

[@ЮраН-ь2к]

N is nasal itself!

[@kevpaulsen]

In elementary school (in the greater Chicago area), I had a teacher who used the macron to mark the (any) long vowel sound and the breve for any short vowel sound. Apparently this was tied to helping us determine whether a syllable ended at the vowel or at the consonant. Syllables that end with a vowel were supposed to have the vowel pronounced long, but ending in a consonant required the short vowel sound. That always seemed rather circular to me because you had to already know the pronunciation.

[@jennieluft8746]

I was going to make the same comment. I went to school in the Midwest in 19. Well, never mind…. When learning to read we had a lot of worksheets doing what you mentioned above. I don’t recall if the marks were present when my children were learning to read in the early 2000’s.

[@allanrichardson1468]

Dictionaries do the same thing, if not in the first occurrence of a word, then in parentheses to show pronunciation, if they don’t use the IPA (which ought to be called the IFA).

[@PaulWilliams-yh6sy]

My primary school in Australia did the same thing when I was 5 or 6.

[@harlangrove3475]

Common in most American English dictionaries.

[@pedanticm]

As much as I personally love this idea, as someone who proofreads, it would be double work for us to decipher words that people also frequently mispronounce. (Nucular, Chipolte, etc.)

[@fibanocci314]

Maybe they'd mispronounce them less if they weren't guessing as often? Also "defiantly" (definitely).

[@terrysouthwood4757]

Excellent explanation why accents are valuable. Learning a second language myself, as an only English speaker, I was ignoring the accents in my new language. This led to confusion in understanding for the people who were listening to me. I now force myself to use the accents and the difference this makes is palpable. Thank you for offering this insight into how accents would make English easier to read and understand.

[@boi905]

Dōn’t you mean, “it’s tīmĕ to bring thė presėnt doub̆t to a clòse and coöpėrātĕ for chāngĕ”? I propose, since isn’t cȯnsistent on whether it soft̆ėns in frȯnt of I think we shòùl̆d give it ȧ cārȯn or ci̠rcumflex. Àlsō I think we shòùl̆d shòw when and get voicĕd. Ȧdi̠tiȯnȧlly, th̠ė grāve can bē ūṡĕd to shòw when an says /a/ as in “father” or when sayṡ /u/ in “do” or when sayṡ /ʊ/ in “put”. Lastly I think fīnȧl sīlent dȯĕṡn’t need ȧ brēve bēcȧ̠u̠̇ṡe th̠ė rāre i̠nstȧnceṡ it iṡ prȯnouncėd you can mark it. “It’s tīme tò bring th̠ė preṡėnt doub̆t tò ȧ clōṡe and coöpėrāte for chānĝe."

[@williswameyo5737]

Kikuyu also uses acute accent on the vowels i and u to emphasize the stress of vowels being rounded in pronunciation for instance: Wairimú and Karimí

[@_stardustcolors]

i already knew that the macron is often used for elongated vowels in other languages mainly because of how people romanise japanese. in japanese, specifically when writing in hiragana, you can add an う after any character ending in an "u" or "o" sound to elongate it (eg ありがとう) and likewise you can also add an い after any character ending in an "i", or "e" sound for the same effect (eg せんせい) and an あ after any character ending in an "a" sound to elongate it too (eg おばあさん), whereas in katakana you just add a dash (eg テレキャスター), and when romanising japanese, macrons are often used for that. take the word 吸血鬼 (きゅうけつき, the japanese word for vampire, kanji literally translates to "blood-sucking demon") for example. when romanising that word, you can romanise it as "kyuuketsuki" or as "kyūketsuki" (depending on the limitations you're working with and personal preference ig)

[@Tiqerboy]

Yes, I agree, if you confine it to that use. The problem with English, the long vowels aren't really longer versions of the short vowels like in Japanese. For example in kit and kite, short i is so much different than long i. They don't seem related. kite should probably be spelled as kaite with two dots over the i, but then he said don't change the spelling of the words we already have.

[@simonhenry7867]

​@@Tiqerboy next step,we could get ride of the e on the end those word Or not It's ā way to māk this work somtīms. sē, sāvs on confūsion with prēfixes and suffixes.

[@AlexandreMeloArtista]

In portuguese we use the ~ to represent nasality in a vowel, i.e Pan -> pã; pagan -> pagão; manus (latin for hand) -> mão, etc.

[@fmobus]

it's also a good shibboleth to catch gringos trying to pass as speakers of the language. Takes them years to nail it.

[@FGGiskard]

Nice proposal, definitely worth trying. As a Spaniard speaking also English French Italian and in process of learning German I tell you accents are both helpful and cumbersome but help understand pronunciation much faster and help aloud double senses

[@tetronym4549]

I don’t think that silent letters were put there just to “show off”, but more that they make the etymology “preserved”, which is really important when you take loan words from SO MANY sources like English does. EDIT: By the way, thank you for slotting into the Tom Scott shaped hole in my heart

[@thatotherted3555]

I just noticed how weird it is that the P was added to *receipt,* but not to *deceit* or *conceit.*

[@Alphabunsquad]

@@thatotherted3555aren’t there some British people who pronounce the p in receipt? I don’t know how long that’s been going on for if at all, I might be thinking of when I heard ESL speakers say it.

[@santa_clause]

i knew he reminded me of someone

[@LeoConnonHay]

​@@Alphabunsquadno

[@KingOfSciliy]

@@thatotherted3555 It signifies a correlation between 'reciept' and 'recipient'. Just as 'debt' and 'debit' or 'sign' and 'signal'

[@amherst88]

Enlightening and entertaining as always -- and further reminders of why I'm grateful to be a native speaker and not to be learning English as a second language!

[@RaidHossain-9910]

"English has a lot of silent letters" French enters the chat:💀

[@az.floral]

Français (mas) literally has a silent S.

[@RaidHossain-9910]

@@az.floral But it also has sometimes c, always D, E, F, G, H, P, R, S, T, X, Z

[@RaidHossain-9910]

@@az.floral So relatively half of the alphabet, and the word hâtent has 4 silent letters and ONLY 2 ARE PRONOUNCED!

[@az.floral]

@@RaidHossain-9910 Yeah, thats why i only said one, there's too many examples

[@RaidHossain-9910]

@@az.floral Yeah

[@arwenwestrop5404]

I just love this. Accent marks are such fun! You did one funny thing though. When discussing the 'grave' you used a couple of 'acute's in Dutch één! However, I can't think of a single occasion where Dutch uses a 'grave', so if you did want to use that language you really had no choice! BTW I love the way you jump from language to language to language and back again!

[@katkalocova]

Plenty of diacritics in my native language, mostly (not exclusively) used to palatalise consonants or indicate vowel quantity. I enjoy these little thought experiments and am so glad that someone has the time on their hands to devote to them and present (underscore e) us with the results. Thank you! Oh and by the way, I also instantly flinched when you talked about 'schwa is never stressed', make way for Dr. Geoff!

[@tbuyus8328]

Other people have used similar systems before including McGuffey and Webster in their early dictionaries. People have also created software (that can apply such formatting automatically). I wrote an extension that allows one to surf the net with diacritic assistance but I cant share it in the comments. No self-promotion :(. Other people like @DavidMorganEd have done similar work - his work is able to cater for regional accents (very nice!)

[@s0matando]

10:44 the acute accent marker also often changes the sound of the vowel -- if not in Spanish, at least in Portuguese it does. In Portuguese, the "é" in "café" sounds a little bit like "e" in "red" rather than what the pure letter "e" usually sounds like, as in the first half of "a" in "say", i.e. without the transition to "i" or "ee".

[@Bernardoskau]

caramelo lover localizado

[@patrickfox-roberts7528]

in Irish it changes the vowel from short to long

[@eaanaoea]

English is a second language for me. It's so refreshing and an absolute relief for me to listen to you, for all the reasons you say in the videos. Somehow I made the language problems my problem. Glad to know I'm not crazy, or at least I'm not crazy alone, for thinking we can better ourselves and the things we use and care about.

[@veepotter307]

As a native English speaker, I still get confused so don’t beat yourself up. I still have problems with live and live, lose and loose, read and read! Learning English as a Second Language must be a nightmare!

[@Emadden79]

Pi

[@marcdragon2936]

Your English is fucking fantastic

[@garrynewman6211]

@@marcdragon2936 Good day, I do hope this message finds you in the most splendid of times! As English is but my third linguistic endeavor, I find myself occasionally at odds with its intricate nuances and delicate turns of phrase. Might I be so bold as to inquire whether you would be so kind as to impart upon me a few pearls of wisdom to aid in my humble quest for eloquence and mastery of this most esteemed tongue?

[@marcdragon2936]

@@garrynewman6211 Good day to you as well, friend! As English is a language in which I've studied, particularly in relation to education, I am fully comprehensive of your struggle with its intricacies- Fuck this. I hate writing formal English. When I write, I always write like I'm scripting a video. It's kind of how I learned to write. I used to tell my students that they didn't have to write super formally, or have a lot of words. I would usually grade essays and shit based on how well they got their point across. Or if it was an educational essay, it was how well they understood it and explained it in a way that was interesting.

[@bisum1790]

Brilliant video.. This change is very much needed for non-English speakers to understand English better...❤

[@amyen333]

I had a really hard time learning how to read growing up and one of my teachers had a system like this to teach kids how to read. I feel so lucky every day that I was put in her class because it was life changing.

[@polyesterspecter]

As a typeface nerd, I really appreciate your use of Strenuous Black! As a native Spanish speaker, I'm absolutely in favor of using diacritical marks. Love these suggestions!

[@oriinafloresta]

I created a system similar to this for my school work... didn't last very long because i didn't record it and I kept changing it. Also, it's a surprising amount of extra effort to write diacritics.

[@tb_eest]

If you switch your keyboard to US (International) it will be relatively trivial to add some of those diacritics to your letters. Combine " ' ` ~ or ^ with a fitting letter and it'll type it öút lìkê so. Though that doesn't include the proposed schwa dot or the emphasis things.

[@tantuce]

Writing a diacritic sign is as much effort as adding the line on the t's.

[@tb_eest]

@@tantuce depending on whether you're typing or writing

[@kwadwokwarteng3217]

Another job well done, Rob! I also liked your new version of the alphabet you made that one time. Simply fine work, one of the best!

[@_citarra_]

Oh, this is brilliant! What a clever way to make english easier to read!

[@lajawi.]

0:39 I've learned to read, write, and speak English, not as my second, but fourth language! And opposed to French, I found it to be quite easy!

[@jabbertwardy]

I was thrilled that diaeresis made an appearance along with The New Yorker magazine, including a glimpse of the very (amusing) article that introduced me to this diacritic! Well done!

[@rustyreturns9754]

Love it! When learning French, I found the accents were very helpful. English would benefit greatly.

[@mushymush6902]

Rob's annoyance at those blasted showoff scholars putting silent letters in words is the most validating thing. I too seethe whenever I see a b in a word that has no business having a b.

[@CouchTomato87]

Without a doubt

[@midshipman8654]

Something I like about the overall visual language of english is the LACK of seperate marks. One thing about accent marks is that I fond them a bit of a pain to write over time. especially when I am writing cursive and doting i’s and t’s is already an extra step. And even outside of cursive, in print, its nice to write a single character with a single stroke, which is something I do like about english. maybe instead of seperate accents, we try those tail things that some languages use that are connected to the modified letter so you dont have to raise your hand an extra time.

[@nolongerlistless]

Excellent point!

[@21stcenturyozman20]

midshipman8654 - here's a mnemonic hint for you: 'seperate' - there's *a rat* in separate.

[@judithstrachan9399]

True, but I think we’d just get used to it. Eventually.

[@angelavonhalle5144]

Yes, english is fun when you get the hang of it. But reading a lot can help you learn to guess your way around. I don't know how I could have coped with the intricasies of the English llanguage without reading a lot (oh yes, and old books, like Dickens and Jane Austen). English is better in the end without all those accents.

[@DRWDesigns]

I saw "found" and "wound" in your list of words that aren't pronounced the same, and thought "but they are!" Then I realized you were talking about "wound" as an injury, not "wound" as the past tense of "wind".

[@RobWords]

This only serves to further illustrate the problem!

[@stevetournay6103]

Ah, but wind is a noun, and doesn't rhyme with wind...😁

[@stevetournay6103]

​@@RobWordsOh Rob, you just split an infinitive. Trekkie much? 😁

[@georgehill3087]

It would be very annoying to type, but I can see this being very useful in textbooks. Like how Chinese has Pinyin to help people learn how to pronounce the words.

[@mouseyender]

Just a little tidbit - when we talk about long and short vowels in English, we are really talking about two different vowel sounds. In Classical Latin, Ancient Greek, and indeed Old English, long and short vowels were exactly that - long and short versions of the same sound, and macrons were used to differentiate when a vowel was held longer. Since Modern English doesn't have phonemic vowel length, it is hard for native speakers of English to hear the difference between long and short vowels. The reason why we use the term "long and short" to describe two different vowel sounds is because these terms are vestigial from when English actually did have long and short vowels. Now, there is certainly nothing wrong with using a macron to differentiate between two different vowel sounds, especially since both these sounds are already represented by the same letter, but they are not "long" and short" as they are so often called.

[@oddhole]

I'd say the "long vowels" are diphtongs: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphthong. It always baffles me that a language that has such an abundance of diphtongs in pronunciation, seems to have no way of spelling these.

[@LookingForAnotherPlanet]

Love this!

[@tantuce]

​@@oddholemonophthongs.

[@pgrvloik]

I'm so happy I found out your channel recently. I find it fascinating and I really enjoy the way you present all this.

[@ianr1557]

We should start using these, or at least some of them... For years I have proposed using the macron to differentiate between short and long vowels, and that was really pleasantly surprising seeing you suggest that in this video... The other diacritics were interesting to see as well! The only thing that was different was I had thought of using the macron only in situations where words are spelled the same but have a different vowel sound, such as "wind" and "wīnd", or "bass" and "bāss", "lead" or "lēad", etc, etc.... That could be a simple step towards the more comprehensive revisions you mentioned 🤷

[@laurieomoore94]

There are so many of your videos that I wish I could give multiple "thumbs up" to. This is another one.

[@sakr-el-bahr272]

Thank you Rob. Before watching this entertaining video I had one language I could understand. Now I have none.

[@DawnDavidson]

😂

[@TheRaven2208]

Hey Rob, now we really need to hear you recite "Chaos" by Trenité (this one poem about English pronunciation). Maybe even with those additional accents to make sense of it? Or explaining on a few examples in the poem why words are pronounced the way they are. I'd love it!

[@stephenremington8448]

Watching that, I recalled at school in the English Midlands we had a Geordie teacher, unlike everyone else there, he pronounced books like bukes. Strangely, a pupil had the surname Tookinson, which we pronounced Tuke-inson but he pronounced the start to rhyme with our book pronounciation.

[@cruztastrophe]

"byewks"? I can't figure out how to pronounce bukes in my head. Rhymes with nukes? Or "nyuks"?

[@stephenremington8448]

@@cruztastrophe rhymes with nukes.

[@Relaxihub]

As an Arab I started learning English since first grade and up until middle school everything was so confusing, until I started learning French in middle school, I then realised how easy English is Although accents exist in French they don’t quite help that much in advanced French Now I’m a high-schooler and I speak English, broken French and currently learning Spanish , wish me luck ^v^

[@burlapsacc]

I think this would be a good method for English learners, and could be used as a tool for differentiation in accents. For example, you said the word "Brother" would include two schwa's, but in the American accent, it only has one! Pretty neat.

[@verylostdoommarauder]

The genius thing about incorporating diacritics is that it would be far easier and cheaper to implement than a spelling reform. You would only need to paint on accents rather than replacing entire signs.

[@mandowarrior123]

I'm glad we only communicate with road signs.

[@ArtMuxomor]

It is a very interesting video. I actually never thought about adding more signs to English letters because i already remembered how to read the words. This may help new learners 👍

[@Lynda640]

I never ever thought of pre-sent “sent in advance” I did think of present as in… “display”, “gift”, “here”, “now”.

[@nickj3218]

You are so articulate and likeable bro

[@joeyattack99]

I'm currently studying A-Level English Language and you're very insightful! I would argue though that there is some issue with including accents that teach pronounciation because, as you mentioned, people with different accents pronunce words differently, and the implication that "x way of speaking is correct/standard" is *very* controversial

[@HughvanZyl]

Bro, there are correct, standard ways of pronunciation. Anything other than that is wrong. Now, as long as people can understand you, it's not a bad thing, but it's still true. Whenever I speak a different language, I try to pronounce words in the standard way. For Dutch that's Standaardnederlands, for German, that's Hochdeutsch, and for English, that's received pronunciation.

[@margaretdevery6547]

Kia Ora from New Zealand. I love this, as I'm involved with helping refugees from non-English speaking countries, & I know how daunting learning our language is to them. Saw, saw, soar, sore??? Sight, site, cite; honesty, hone, honour; quay, key etc... I was taught by Irish Catholic nuns (!!!) Back in the '60s, & my children think I'm hilarious pronouncing what, when, white, which etc the way I do (I'm certain one of those delightful ladies might haunt me if I didn't!), so I enjoyed this post very much, thank you!

[@Hairmetallurgist]

In Albanian, there is a distinct difference in "ë" between the two main dialects, Gheg and Tosk. I think the "ė" is a brilliant compromise!

[@alberttenfoot]

Hi, Rob! Been following you for a long time and for me this was the most fascinating video you've presented so far, I think the inclusion of these diacritics would make things much easier. My only problem is that at 92 plus years of age, it will take me some time to remember them. 🙂

[@AnonymousChannel512]

Damn how was cleopatra

[@ProfPoindexter1968]

Me too, and I'm only 77.

[@alberttenfoot]

@@AnonymousChannel512 I didn't stand a chance against Ptolemy XIII. Theos Philopator. Ptolemy XIV and Mark Antony 😀