another long post, this time about pronunciations and accent marks when it comes to english and how that relates to modern computing
im no linguist, but due to my unique relationship to language and spoken word, i have a bit of a hyperfixation on english as a language which usually results in my lamenting on how bullshit of a language it is. however, i still really love it for a lot of reasons but i digress.
recently i was trying to think through how the inconsistent letter sound and syllable stress in english results in english speakers just straight up saying things wrong, especially when it comes to other language's words but also just english in general (this is indifferent to accents, accents are literally a product of how the muscles in your mouth formed to produce certain sounds but that's another topic for another day).
in languages like japanese, the sounds produced by a character is almost always going to be the same, regardless of the rest of the word it accompanies. こ is going to be pronounced "ko" no matter how you spin it. versus how in english you often have to consult a phonetic translation of the written letter "a" in order to know if it's pronounce "ah" or "ay"
and so most recently i noticed this as in one of the ttrpg sessions i was running, i named a character "Damiba". i pronounced it "da-mi-BAH" with the stress on the last syllable. despite hearing me say this name out loud, the people i played with sometimes called her "DA-mi-bah", with the stress on the first syllable. quite a few people did it, which surprised me.
so i was trying to think of ways that this could be mitigated, and the one way that it works in literally any other language on earth with alternative pronunciations with letters is accent marks. there are a few words in english that come with accent marks (but they are often loan words and even when written without them, say like naive and facade or even jalapeno, english speakers know what word it is), but for the most part english is an accent absent language.
there are probably historical reasons and precedents as to why this happened moreso than this, but the lack of accents is probably what helped english proliferate as one of the major languages around the world because of how "easy" it can be to communicate through text with it (especially if you do not need to "pause" to add the appropriate accent mark) across digitally based mediums of communication.
however i think a better reason is that the people that invented computers were racist and didn't incorporate accent marks into how computing technology works. i feel like my argument is at least supported in a part due to today how "special" characters often require specific parsers when being read by certain pieces of software. this makes english and the english that's used across computing inherently racist. which you could probably already guess but let me give you an example.
i've mentioned i work in a photo lab and in order to keep photos organized, we often have customer names printed on the back of the prints, so obviously our software needs to capture customer names. if a customer has an accent in their name, such as the name "Aarón" which would be appropriately spelled with that accent mark over the o, cannot be put through our printing software and the ó needs to be changed to an o manually so it can be processed by our printer. same goes for names with apostrophes, O'Brian a typically irish last name or Na'Lyah, a name that could be given to an african-american person, those names need to be manually changed to remove the apostrophes in order for them to not error out in our software. having to remove those Correct spellings of any of these names is a form of racism. it's the exact same as a teacher refusing to pronounce a child's "strange" name because it's not an english name. it's fucking racist and it sucks that i have to be complicit in this form of racism just so i can make a piece of software work.
so many forms of racism have been granfathered into our society through various channels, but honestly one of the most insidious that i witness every day and never stop noticing now is how it affects language and how it makes english dominate over all others. it's practically invisible to us as english speakers but english has infected nearly every single system in the world, especially through technology and computing. websites urls are only ever rendered in english. twitter handles are always in english. these two things happen indifferent to the country of origin of the website or the twitter user.
what's the solution? i don't know. like the age old "how can you imagine any other system than the one you are entrenched in" especially when it comes to capitalism. how can a wider and often uneducated public understand how socialism can work when propaganda exists and all of us have been chained by capitalism for as long as we have been alive? how can we imagine computing systems that exist without baked in racism when people my age that have grown up with the internet being a large part of their lives?
it seems like it might be far too late to change how these systems and frameworks... well work. especially with how all modern computing is built upon basically the first iteration of what was "modern computing". i've seen the software some of my friends who've worked for floor tile manufacturer use. it's not even navigable by a mouse. the software itself doesn't even know what a "mouse" is. this software is still being used in 2022 as far as i'm aware.
the actual way people are doing this now though are inventing those text parsers (which i think helped due to emojis being more prevalent in text around the world which is... another topic for another day) that can process alternative characters and actually "read" what those characters are without breaking the entire system it's input into. it's the necessary work for keeping text accessible to not just non-english speakers but also things like visually impaired people too.
well, that's a lot about english and computing. thanks for reading.