How was English lucky enough to get a simple, 26-letter alphabet with no diacritics?

How was English lucky enough to get a simple, 26-letter alphabet with no diacritics?

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Other urls found in this thread:

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_spelled_with_Ä
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_spelled_with_Ë
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_spelled_with_Ï
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_spelled_with_Ö
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_spelled_with_Ü
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>Lucky enough
Nigga your orthography is a disaster.

lucky if you want a good keyboard layout

It wasn't luck. Anglos were literally too pea-brained to consider diacritics

Do you use US International?

Literally not my problem

Conservatism.

The spellings predate use of diacritics as separate letters and not just rare notation.

You can't deny there's SOVL to it, though. There's more to a language's orthography than just being "phonetic"; I'd argue that, while benefiting some languages, a completely-phonetic orthography would be bad for English.
Most of the words you see in English used to be pronounced like their spelling. "Knight", while pronounced "nait", used to be pronounced /knixt/ for example.
Some of the "used to be pronounced" spellings still are pronounced in some accents. There are accents that distinguish between: loot and lute, weight and wait*, fur and fir, wine and whine, horse and hoarse, yew-you-ewe, etc.
*If you consider Scots a dialect of English.
There's a lot of etymology retained in the spelling, some words spelled on a false-etymological basis (like "island", "debt", "thumb", etc.), but if there were any spelling changes that at least could be corrected.
Some of the modern advantages are artificial since it's biased toward English, but basic characters work best on computers.
It would also obscure written relation between different words, making their different forms less predictable, and common suffixes would be spelled differently depending on the word. Written English is much more consistent than spoken English.
>The idea of phonemic spelling has also been criticized as it would hide morphological similarities between words with differing pronunciations, thus obscuring their meanings. It is also argued that when people read, they do not try to work out the series of sounds composing each word, but instead they recognize words either as a whole or as a short series of meaningful units (for example morphology might be read as morph+ology, rather than as a longer series of phonemes). In a system of phonetic spelling, these morphemes become less distinct, due to the various pronunciations of allomorphs. For example, in English spelling, most past participles are spelled with -ed, even though its pronunciation can vary (compare raised and lifted).

English did have äëïöü to indicate the start of a new syllable instead of being a digraph, but it fell out of use.
Zoë, Chloë, coöperate, reälly, doïng, naïve, coïncidence, zoölogy, and so forth.

yes. it also sucks that any non-ISO layouts (like 80% of keyboard market) has a missing button, so i cannot buy them for personal usage.

By absolutely butchering it's own romanization

i can't understand people who write naïve with the special character

We are RVMANS

It's more than 26 tho...

WTF? Why did you brainlets get rid of that?

Digraphs
Also we used to have entirely regular stress, right? I'd guess our lack of accent diacritics is due to us not having a need for them when we first started writing

It indicates that it's not pronounced as one-syllable and is not pronounced rhyming with "rave".

Maybe we should reïnstate it.

It's because of the Dutch. English used to have a 27th letter, thorn, which fell out of use because the printing presses (imported from the Netherlands) didn't have a type for it. Icelandic still has it, though.

For a more extended list:
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_spelled_with_Ä
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_spelled_with_Ë
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_spelled_with_Ï
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_spelled_with_Ö
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_spelled_with_Ü

Dropping it has actually changed the pronounciation of some words.
"Cocaine" used to be three, not two syllables (Cocaïne) and the spelling without the symbol influenced the modern pronunciation.

English had a bunch of different letters throughout time: Þ, Ð, Ƿ, Æ, Ȝ.