[snip]
>By imagining “es” instead of “ê”, we can often deduce the meaning of unknown words; for example, forêt = forest, fête = “feste” = fest(ival); intérêt = interest and many others. The circumflex accent is used in the very same sense also for other vowels, for example île = isle, hôte = “hoste” = host, hâte = haste.
I will always remember this, thanks to my high school French teacher who, knowing her audience, gave us a few examples like "hôpital," and then said "So you can probably guess was 'bâtard' means..."
Swedish word for it is strikingly similar, but with a hint of being more "hip and trendy restaurant in gentrified neighborhood": Fönster.
Like with any word, it's use in colloquial form may vary from generation to generation, from subculture to subculture etc
English on the other hand has so many exceptions (usually based on the origin of the word), that I still encounter words that I'll mispronounce at first. I can typically pass as a native speaker, until I "leak" by tripping on one of those.
Though one downside which I've gleaned from friends who are non-native English speakers, is that the variance in pronunciation in English does sometimes lead to native English understanding what you meant, whereas in Spanish if you're pronouncing it wrong the listener often has no idea what you're trying to say. That's heavy anecdata though. I'd be super interested to hear from others if that's been their experience or not.
I've worked in universities and in tech, in New Jersey, LA, and Silicon Valley, and I feel like I can understand just about anyone's English.
Ironically, the ones I have the hardest time understanding are almost always Brits.
The former for me have a bit more exhale and round sound while the “in” are a tad drier.
For example “fin” and “faim” are distinct for me. However “faim” and “feint”
I’m not a native English speaker and I gave up trying to pronounce th (father, through). Although I can hear the difference.
After a cursory search it seems my Parisian-ish accent is at fault: https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Annexe:Prononciation/fran%C3%...
Why can't the Québécois count to four? Because there is a tree in the way.
Doesn't mean there aren't exceptions, but it's staggering how internally inconsistently English is.For example "read" and it's famous past tense, differently pronounced "read".
Still, we've got a couple fun ones au Québec, like betterave "bet-rav" caught me off guard or gruau "gree-au".
There's the classic squirrel/écureuil situation where the French word is hard to pronounce for English-speakers, and the English word is hard for French-speakers.
Loving my bilingual spot of the world.
Relevant concept here is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth
Source: native French speaker and professional translator.
English is not really one language in a sense given that it uses words from some many others. Anglo-Saxon, French, Latin, Greek, etc.
I recommend asking people how "ough" is pronounced instead. Cough, bough, though, thought, through, thorough, hiccough--enough!
And the least phonetically consistent is English.
Finnish (from what I've heard, as I don't speak it) is even more regular in the sense that this also works the other way around, i.e., if you hear a word, you can use rules to know how to spell it. This does not always hold in Spanish (e.g. B and V are pronounced the same, so you cannot know if you're hearing "vaca" or "baca" without resorting to context and common sense reasoning) although it does hold for all but a small bunch of grapheme pairs.
* Modulo regional variants, but if you focus in any given variant (e.g. Spanish from Spain) this holds.
I guess maybe they're not "languages you know", so your statement is still accurate, but surely the Chinese languages and Japanese are even further than English on this spectrum. Some (but not all) Chinese characters encode how the character was pronounced in ancient Chinese, which might give a vague hint to how it's pronounced in modern Chinese languages, but that's about it. And Japanese is even worse: most Japanese words are written using Chinese characters, but the same character can have several different pronunciations (for example, the same character might have three pronunciations: one for a Chinese loanword, another for the same Chinese loanword that entered Japan in a different century, and a third for a native Japanese word whose pronunciation isn't connected to the Chinese pronunciation at all). Also, one character in Japanese can have a several syllable pronunciation, whereas in Mandarin and Cantonese at least, polysyllabic characters are extremely rare.
é - the accent is pointing up, so it's a higher-pitched e
è - the accent is pointing down, so it's a lower-pitched e
* It's also in their names - aigu and grave, but this requires knowing what these words mean.
ë, contrary as said in the article (full slop?) is the most complicated and with some exceptions. But there is so few words that use that letter that you just don't have to care.
Just pronounce ë as è when its in (inside) a word and not pronounced at all when it's at the end. The only exception I can think of is canoë (pronounced conoé), but everybody will understand if you say cano.
What else is there with ë except for Noël and Israël ?
For instance, this word "ambiguë" was changed in the 1990 spelling reform to "ambigüe" [2] probably to emphasis the fact that the U is not mute (because for most -gue words it is, like for "fatigue" in french and english).
Like with ï and ü, the tréma mark is precisely the mark of an exception.
[1] https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/ambigu%C3%AB , https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/aigu%C3%AB
That's contingent on your ability to imagine sounds doing ups and downs.
I'd think that associating pitch increase/decrease with up/down works for the vast majority of people without any second thought.
French is not a tonal language like Chinese. Pitch is not used to distinguish between different phonemes.
For record, if ever you are ashamed to have some accent in french, one current top show in France with French people on it got french subtitles (about farmer looking for love)
That is very far from the truth, and unhelpful. Yes, some people have accents, but it’s not because you cannot hear the difference (or at least claim you cannot) that it does not exist. Out of curiosity, how do you pronounce "il a fermé la fenêtre"?
For non-French people: there are accents in which é and è are most of the time very similar, particularly in the South. They are very proud of it somehow. I am all for regional accents, but claiming that your particular pronunciation is the one true way is ridiculous.
Ah, so you're not Parisian.
No we don’t, wtf
é and è (as well as e but it goes without saying) are very clearly distinct sounds.
I suppose you're replying to someone from the area. And it's undoubtedly Parisien to assume that the way they pronounce is how the whole country does it, lol
One friend of mine once had to translate English-to-English in France. A French policeman or taxi driver or something knew English as a second language. My friend is from New Jersey and sounds like what I might call CNN English (is there a name for roughly "unaccented" Northeast/West Coast/DC English?). The other person he was with had a thick Alabama accent. The Frenchman could not understand what he said directly, but could understand it when repeated by the New Jerseyan.
General American English.
Although it's traditionally much more common among white people in the western half of the country. People on the east coast, as well as black people everywhere, traditionally have distinctive accents (though these are fading over time, and many people from either group now speak pure General American).
Could you be talking about the southern accent where maybe those sound similar?
A pet theory of mine is that people confusing "est" (sounds like "è", means "[he/she/it] is") and "et" (sounds like "é", means "and") while writing grew up with an accent that does not make the distinction between those sounds. (I don't criticize the mistake or the accent but have always been curious about this precise kind of writing mistake because those two words sound so different to me)
* In fairness, most (but not all) of it was probably light-hearted laughter, but I didn't understand that at the time so it left an unfortunate psychological imprint on me that is hard to shake and gives me anxiety even thinking about it
Not GP but I want to note that the pronounciation of "faith" would never occur in metropolitan French, as it features a diphthong. And in Quebec fête has a diphthong but féte would not have one I think (please correct me if I am wrong), and it is not the one in faith anyway.
But also true that we have some strong local accents, and that people no matter their level should feel encouraged to at least try to speak French. It's the best way to learn.
Gone are the days when American actors flaunted those crisply enunciated albeit preposterous "continental" accents
No we don't.
In the South the é sound is more common while in the North they tend to pronounce the è very 'correctly', but that does not apply to all words.
For instance the way someone pronounces "après". In the South it is quite common to pronounce it pretty much like if it was written "aprés". Same goes for "est", e.g. il est(é) vs il est(è).
That's how you recognise a Parisian in Marseille because they have an "accent pointu" ;)
This annoyed my French teacher, a native Parisian, no end. She'd get extremely frustrated and say something like "Can't you hear what you wrote?! You don't pronounce 'Noël' as 'Noél', that sounds ridiculous!" and for the life of me I could not hear the difference.
Yeah, my French grades weren't great. But I redeemed myself much later in life by having an extended spoken conversation, where misspellings matter much less, in French with a very patient Canadian listener.
Also I felt better to find out a lot of the differences in various French accents relate to how these vowels are pronounced. A funny anecdote I heard was from a Qubecios person who visited Paris and placed an order at a restaurant in French. The two waitresses stared at him for a couple of seconds, and then one of them leaned to the other and whispered, in French, "I think he's trying to speak French."
Wait, no! This is the most complicated one, fortunately it's scarcely appears.
In canoë, the ë is pronounced as an é. In Noël, it's pronounced as an è. In ambiguë, it's not pronounced at all!
That’s why they always have such predictable accents in another language.
Dr Geoff Lindsey on youtube:
short version: https://youtube.com/shorts/GF1gIaxnULc?si=d4jFC-rLOC5dww-8
long version: https://youtu.be/GNpbv7hJf6c?si=xNz1UjeLY0Ch9eDv&t=366
Recently I read _Erec and Enide_ [1] and it was really cool to be able to find the original Old French version of it and read large parts of it (not the whole thing) and find it so much easier to read than Early Middle English like the _Ancrene Wisse_ [2], etc.
One of the things I've really appreciated about LLMs is to be able to ask about the divergence of the Romance languages, e.g. "why does 'y' mean 'there' in French and 'and' in Spanish?" and get a legible response. It's really enhanced the learning experience by taking seemingly arbitrary differences and situating them in historical contexts, etc. I think it makes more connections somehow and helps me build fluency faster.
IDK what my point is, I just find this stuff fun to think about, even if you're not a French language learner. I'm gonna have to dig deeper into this site, thanks for sharing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erec_and_Enide [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancrene_Wisse
Yes, but there are other uses. For instance, in "ambiguë", the ë itself is silent but signals that the u before it is pronounced as a standard u. Without the diaeresis, the u itself would be silent but would make the g hard (in French, g before e is soft).
The thing here for those wondering is the masculine and feminine in French, with the feminine created by adding an 'e' (often silent!). "Ambigu" is masculine and "ambiguë" is feminine but as you said without the diaeresis that final 'e' would completely change the pronounciation of the word.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47533035
:)
single letter = sound
letter + z = "hissing" version of the sound
letter + accent = soft version of the hissing sound
letter + i = same previous item, but caused by "i"
rz = legacy, czechs still pronounce it as a different letter
This is how I understand it as Ukrainian
The partial answer being, some dialects retain differences and they are significant. My own accent is not terrible especially for an American raised when and where I was, but I internalized it early enough (just through middle school instruction, sadly) that I don't even know if I pronounce them all the same... I'd have to read some passages and inspect.
But I was hoping for a little more by way of explicit discussion of the why, which I infer is largely: diacriticals are mostly artifacts of etymology which at some point became ossified and absent a Dudens-like change in prescriptive heart, are here to stay, mostly unvoiced indicators of language evolution (like the silent k and gh in English knight).
Good luck guessing the pronounciation just gotta learn it. Clearly the superior system.
Actually, if they used accents to denote, whether a word was male or female, I would be totally down.
