Hacker News Reader

Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

>only 26 letters with no accents on a keyboard

This was caused by the printing press and the typewriter (keyboard) both of which forced simplifications in the written English language.

View on HN

You just press backspace and hit the accent mark key or for a printing press stack the accent mark on top of the letter. People ditched accents because they were rarely used in English writing (only really being used for some loanwords), not because simplifications were forced by typewriters or the printing press (which handle non-English languages just fine).

For printing presses we're talking about the influence of the first printing presses hundreds of years before industrialization which were imported from Germany and even when they started making their own in England they were more like clones and used imported designs and parts. The early machines had a heavy influence on the written language particularly at times when under 1 in 10 people could write, and with the advent of movable type the people who learned to write were heavily influenced by what they read... books printed on German-design machines. You really only need one generation in a situation like that to dramatically change the language. Losing þ, æ, and ð

And yet other languages have managed to resist those simplifications. So it's clearly not 100% forced.

Who says other languages haven't undergone significant changes?

Some have. But certainly many continue to use letters beyond those 26, despite the difficulty of using those letters in various technologies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com