Yes, and how do those entirely true observations connect to the non-use of diacritics in English?
I pointed out the ship example from the text, which was used to demonstrate how "this early French influence over English, which arose from the Norman Conquest, is the beginning of the reason why English is written without accent marks. ... This was the French habit that the Normans brought to England: the use of extra letters to spell sounds that the alphabet didn’t have special letters for. This is why English has combinations like sh, th, ee, oo, ou that each make only a single sound."
That's an extra letter being used to indicate a different sound than the base sound, similar to how diacritics are used to indicate a different sound than the base sound ("the cedilla has the function of ensuring that a c can be pronounced like an s, despite coming before an a, o, or, u").
> "is the beginning of the reason why English is written without accent marks"
> sh, th, ee, oo, ou
That's cool 'n all, but I believe that only applies to French writing in English for English people.
Many languages have combinations of letters that have a single sound, it's no excuse for not having accents.
In German one can write strasse and straße or müller and mueller (different writing, same sound). They too don't have accents, but words written differently also sound different: schon = "already" and schön = "beautiful".
But German, on one hand retained diacritic marks, on the other it's also almost deterministic about pronunciation.
a it's always /a/
ä it's always /ɛ/ or /ə/ like e
sch it's always /ʃ/ as in schule
ch it's always /x/ after a, o, u and /ç/ after e, i
and so on
English doesn't use diacritics, IMO, because English doesn't make sense, it's a pastiche of lowest common denominators, so fck diacritics, they are too hard, let's write words as we like and pronounce them the way we feel they should sound, regardless of how they are written.
But it could use accents, for example rècord and recòrd, present and presènt, pérmit and permìt it's just they never thought it could be useful...
> Many languages have combinations of letters that have a single sound, it's no excuse for not having accents.
You don't need an "excuse" for not having accents. Digraphs and diacritical marks are simply two different ways to mark a letter as being pronounced as "somewhat similar but different". Whether one is better than the other is a matter of subjective perception, and it's very common for languages to not do it consistently. For example, Spanish has "ll" but also "ñ" (ironically the latter used to be "nn"!), and Czech has "č" but also "ch".
What's criminal about English is not the lack of diacritics, but rather the extremely convoluted and hard to predict rules for interpreting digraphs and trigraphs. If "ch" always meant the same thing, it would be just fine.
> but I believe that only applies to French writing in English for English people
Shrug. Yes, languages have different paths in their evolution. Film at 11.
I still like what this linguistics PhD wrote about the specific history of one aspect of English language evolution.
> English doesn't make sense
That is of course an exaggeration. Just because the rules are complex and full of exceptions doesn't mean there's no sense. Even if you reject all of linguistics, Shannon in “Prediction and entropy of printed English”, demonstrated that English is compressible, which means there must be some patterns.
> Just because the rules are complex and full of exceptions doesn't mean there's no sense
That's exactly what "makes no sense" means, actually.
> demonstrated that English is compressible
of course it is
> which means there must be some patterns
Of course there are. Patterns are (almost) everywhere - even PI is normal, but not random - but patterns in English make little or no sense for a language born and developed among, in the same era and having close contact with, a lot of other much more regular languages. The two facts are orthogonal.
Even Sumerian is more regular than modern English...
The truth is, both things happen. People slow down — not just because they stop moving, but because life changes. They feel more tired, take on more responsibilities, and have less time and energy for themselves. And yes, sometimes the body begins to decline — gradually or even suddenly. It’s normal, and it happens to many.
> A healthy lifestyle improves outcomes pretty much regardless of genetics
to be able to afford a healthy life depends a lot on luck, much more than good DNA.
secondarily: modern western societies make it almost impossible for a large portion of the population to live such a lifestyle.
It's more probable than an African lives a healthy life style, even in poverty, than an American working 70 hours/week, with no paid holidays, trapped in stressful groundhog days in highly polluted cities.
That's why I never left my country, even though it costed me a lot monetarily wise.
> I suspect ignorance is bliss here as your post seems to be mostly weird stereotypes
these are just your prejudices talking
you haven't even presented a point, besides your beliefs, based on nothing.
Several African countries - you clearly know nothing about it - have a similar life expectancy than the US of A. Life expectancy in Mississippi is shorter than Morocco, for example despite a huge difference in wealth.
But they usually live a better life, with better food, stronger sense of community, less work hours, less pollution and a vastly superior culture and historical heritage.
If it wasn't for the western bombs, regime changes and wars waged using fake intelligence, they would never leave their countries for, say, Detroit, Bakersfield, Jackson etc etc
Yes. I’m happy to do whatever makes the most sense in any given situation. I have never in my life thought to myself “I could easily help solve this problem and make everyone better off, but I will refuse because problem-solving is work and work is only for employees.”
> I’m happy to do whatever makes the most sense in any given situation
What makes the most sense in this situation: you walk to the nearest pizza place, you buy your pizza, done.
To an able-bodied person it shouldn't take more than 5 minutes.
Bonus points: you know the way back to your home.
> because problem-solving is work
You know who made someone else's problem a problem=solving problem? You.
The delivery guy will eventually find your place or he's just taking a different route for whatever reason.
How arrogant is it to think that you can tell people how to do their job, from your couch?
You obsession for micro managing other people's actions it only says that you suffer from high anxiety, it is not in any way proof that you make everyone better off. That's just what you tell yourself.
while wanting to monitor what the delivery guy does while doing his job and pretending to "help" him because you truly believe that having tipped a couple dollars makes him your butler, that's completely normal...
alright...
There’s a reason why everyone hates the USA right now — one major reason is that, unlike in much of the world, you truly believe that workers don’t have rights.
honestly wtf are you talking about. What is these insane leaps and projections you're making?? how did you go from having a map that shows you where the driver is to "makes him your butler" and "micromanaging" and "workers don't have rights".
> how did you go from having a map that shows you where the driver is to "makes him your butler" and "micromanaging" and "workers don't have rights".
I sometimes forget that HN is mostly US people, unaware that there is a World out there.
It's illegal or challenged in courts in many developed countries, that are actually developed.
> showing a driver's location on maps in apps like Glovo or Uber can potentially infringe on workers' rights in Europe, particularly under EU labor and data protection regulations.
In Europe, the legal status of gig economy workers on these platforms has been a contentious issue. Several European courts and regulatory bodies have made rulings that impact how these companies can monitor and track their drivers.
> the practice of constant monitoring of delivery drivers by app users (where customers can track drivers' real-time location) has been challenged in several European contexts
ELI5 for you: would you accept a webcam pointed at you that your client (or your employer's clients) can constantly watch, to see if your doing you job the way they want you to do it?
For example, would you accept that a McDonald's customer could monitor how their burger is being made and could give instructions to the people working there, by the sheer overwhelming power of having bought a burger?
The idea is thoroughly absurd. Our days are filled with unpaid labor. Getting dressed in the morning, collecting the items you want to buy in a grocery store, making your bookings for a vacation, giving your spouse feedback on their wardrobe selection, etc. — all of these things are work.
If you want to argue that they are not work, then surely helping a delivery person who's lost in your neighborhood also counts as non-work for the same reason.
Americans (US citizens) eat 114 kg (or 251 pounds) of meat yearly on average.
Chinese eat on average 42kg (or 93 pounds) of meat. It's almost 1/3 (actually it's 37%).
Americans are over eating, Chinese are slightly under eating.
Chinese are more or less eating the same amount of meat a domestic cat eats in the USA.
Which is kinda revealing of how much in the west we abuse of the system.
So if the meat consumption was spread among all countries equally, but most of all correctly, Americans would eat a lot less, while Chinese would eat just a bit more.
It's the same with emissions, some countries are over emitting, it's not about spreading them equally, it's about stopping the abusers.
That would claim that those who over produced (or over ate) were abusers. If the Americans, in your example, over ate because they produced more of the world's needs, are they abusers? If China stopped industries that cause global warming, would those industries only be picked up by other countries because they are wanted or needed?
> If the Americans, in your example, over ate because they produced more of the world's needs, are they abusers?
We know they did it in the past for profit and to flood developing countries with their products so that they wouldn't develop their own economy, because their home made products would cost more, so yes, they are abusers.
But USA stopped manufacturing almost everything 30 years ago. On purpose.
Despite that, they are still one of the worst polluters per capita.
By Co2 emissions alone they produce per capita 300% of the global average.
By Co2 emissions alone.
For comparison EU stops at 117%, my country in EU at 100%, 1/3 of the USA per capita, 1/15th in total.
> If China stopped industries that cause global warming, would those industries only be picked up by other countries because they are wanted or needed?
It would immediately halt the world's economy and it would take at least 30 years to go back to a new normal. Some other country would pick those industries up, probably more than one country, each one of them with lesser output and smaller economy of scale, raising prices.
we don't know how, we sure can't say it would be worse, it probably wouldn't.
modern medicine is not energy intensive likewise aren't better hygiene and better food. Actually vaccines, that fight infectious diseases, have been discovered when we used little or no fossil fuel and the light was kept on by candles or oil, including whale oil.
> If the top 1% dictate what you should do, that is evil, but if they don't, that's also evil?
the top 1% emits to amass more capital for themselves, not to produce what's needed by consumers, who are thereby responsible for their share of emissions and that share is already accounted for in the data.
same pronunciation of sh in ship is found in
- sugar
- sure
- machine
- Chicago
- mustache
- sheikh
- nation (!!!!)
Can you notice that some of those words do not have any "s" in them?
English doesn't make any sense.