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Wed 27 Jul, 2005 05:31 am
The most major hangup I had with French in school was the alphabet. I've always viewed the Cyrillic alphabet as being five to one easier to deal with than whatever the french are doing with the Roman alphabet.
Can anybody state any sort of a consistent rule for using grave and aigu diacriticals over a small case 'e'?
Near as I can tell from reading, it seems as if when a small e is stressed, either in the word or the phrase in which it appears, or if the e in the word because of the nature of the word is likely to be stressed, then a grave accent is used, while an unstressed 'e' gets the accent aigu.
In other words, the 'e' in tres and cafe sound alike to me at least; the only difference seems to be stress in pronounciation.
But I could be missing something. Any thoughts?
French uses the same basic alphabet as English, namely the Latin alphabet, but many of the letters can carry diacritic and other marks (for example, é, à or ô). In French, these marks are not considered to create additional letters.
About.com has a good site about the
pronounciation of accents and the
writing.
Wikipedia gives good infos.
Your usual source
Britannica notes that "[T]he influence of the Germanic Frankish invaders is often held to account for exotic features in Old French, such as strong stress accent and abundant use of diphthongs and nasal vowels; but by the 15th century the language had begun to change, and a sober (even monotonous) intonation and loss of a stress accent became characteristic".
Re: French diacriticals over 'e' ?????
gungasnake wrote:But I could be missing something. Any thoughts?
OMG, the temptation . . . but i won't . . .
The "e" in
très and the "e" in
café definitely
are not pronounced the same. The first "e," with the grave accent, has roughly the sound of the "e" in the English word stress. The second example, with the acute accent, has the sound the "a" in English word grave.
Re: French diacriticals over 'e' ?????
gungasnake wrote:In other words, the 'e' in tres and cafe sound alike to me at least; the only difference seems to be stress in pronounciation.
How can they sound alike if there is a difference in pronounciation?
<Oxymoron here?>
Your example is just a good one:
Tr
ès - open you mouth wide, like in h
ello or str
ess or f
air
Caf
é - open your mouth slightly, like in differ
ence
Ouch! you guys are fast...
The acute and grave accents used with the "e" change pronunciation. The circumflex, as in forêt (which is now being abandoned) indicates that there was once an "s" after the vowell, as in forêt (forest), but forestier (forester), or bâton (a club), but bastonnage (a clubbing or caning). The deux-points, as in naïve, simply indicates that the vowels are to be pronounced separately. The cedilla under a "c" means that it is to be pronounced as as soft "c," when otherwise the vowel conjunction would indicate a hard "c"--the combination "ca" would normally call for a hard "c" (kah), but with the cedilla, ça, becomes soft (sah). The grave accent over an "a" or a "u" is orthographic in nature only, and does not alter pronunciation.
The deux-points, as in naïve, is a tréma.
No one had ever told me that, Boss, thank you . . .
A tréma differs from a diärese ... not much, if at all, I think ...
(It does differ from an umlaut, but an umlaut is no tréma, but a diärese, so ... merde, I studied several subjects, but not linguistics :wink: )
I had diaresis once, but i ate lots of salads and it cleared up in about a week.
That's why you are in the merde now, Walter. :wink:
That's why you were in the merde then, Set. :wink:
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