Why E̱NGLISH shoul̆d start ūsing accėnt màrks

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-2…

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.”

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

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

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!

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.

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

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.

Nah, I prefer to be confused all the time

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).

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).

This probably taught me more about French pronunciation than 3 years studying the subject.

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

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.

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!

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

This is one of the most usefull videos I've seen in a while! I struggle with accents and this marking, at least in private would help me to memorize properly the accent depending on what I'm trying to say: objective, objective same word different meaning depending on the accent lol

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

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).

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!