Re: No diacritics in English

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
Scripsit Colin Fine:

Prompting my view that the apostrophe in English (in nearly all cases,
but triumphantly in this case) serves no linguistic purpose,

Punctuation marks are not supposed to serve linguistics. Perhaps you used the educated word "linguistic" in the meaning "language-related" instead of "related to the study of languages", but then it really obscured the meaning.

Surely the apostrophe in "boy's" serves the purpose of distinguishing the word from "boys". This is language-related even in a very narrow sense.

Of course, we _could_ omit many features of a language and still have ourselves understood at least by people who are very interested in anything we might say. We could omit features of orthography that distinguish similarly pronounced words, we could omit all punctuation and spaces, etc., but readability would be reduced.

but only
the social purpose of enabling the educated elite to recognise each
other - and more importantly, those who are not. In this it is of
course a rule of etiquette.

The case of "its" vs. "it's" is a rather small example of that, though it actually helps to guess whether the writer uses English as his native language - since natives seem to get this wrong far more often than others. :-)

Anyway, features that help people to know something about the educational level of a writer certainly serve linguistic purposes, even in the meaning "related to the study of languages".

It's just marginally an etiquette issue. For the most of it, your orthography tells what you read. Of course, I'm referring to the kinds of texts, if any, that you read on a daily basis. Your orthography is typically a little less correct that the orthography of your textual diet.

I'm not 100% serious - but I am somewhat serious. Maybe 70%.

Spelling is pure convention. In many languages the convention is such that there is rarely any doubt about what spelling to use, or conversely how to read a particular sequence. In others, including English, while there is some order to the convention, much of it must be learned as more or less arbitrary items, and one effect of this fact is to allow those who have had the time, motiviation, encouragement and skill to learn all these to mark themselves out from those who have not.
Punctuation is similar, though even more rarified, because its 'correct' use generally depends on a level of linguistic analysis. (For some reason, I have never come across any serious attempt to teach English punctuation by consideration of how you would speak the words. It's always seemed to me to be a more productive approach for those who do not have an understanding of formal grammr).

If you omit full stops in English you will quite often be misunderstood, or at least leave the reader unsure for a moment what you mean. If you omit commas this is less likely, though there are cases (note particularly the use of commas for non-restrictive, but not for restrictive, relative clauses). My point about apostrophes in English is that almost never do misplaced apostrophes lead to a misunderstanding, even momentarily. Nearly always, the reaction from those that know the rules is 'that apostrophe's wrong', not 'huh?'. That's what I mean by no linguistic purpose.

Colin
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Relevant Pages

  • Re: No diacritics in English
    ... but triumphantly in this case) serves no linguistic purpose, ... Punctuation marks are not supposed to serve linguistics. ... Perhaps you used the educated word "linguistic" in the meaning "language-related" instead of "related to the study of languages", but then it really obscured the meaning. ... We could omit features of orthography that distinguish similarly pronounced words, we could omit all punctuation and spaces, etc., but readability would be reduced. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: No diacritics in English
    ... but triumphantly in this case) serves no linguistic purpose, ... Punctuation marks are not supposed to serve linguistics. ... "related to the study of languages", but then it really obscured the ... addition to "related to the study of languages," and its meaning was ...
    (sci.lang)