>Ê with the circumflex accent marks an “e” after which originally some other letter was written (usually an S), but this letter is no longer present in its modern spelling.
[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..."
As a native (Québécois) French speaker who's been living in the US for most of my adult life, something I miss from French is that once you've learned the (many) rules, you can be pretty confident about how to pronounce a given word.
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.
Native English speaker, but yes this is something I love about Spanish. There are rules to learn (sometimes quite variable depending on Mexico vs. Spain, etc) but once you learn them, pronunciation is usually pretty confident.
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 would say I agree. That being said, my experience is biased from working in Big Tech where the accents are on such a wide spectrum that people have no choice but to develop a "flexible" ear.
Yep, a common anecdote from European science conferences is that by the second day, everybody do settle into the thick, averaged Spanish/German/French/Italian/Russian accent of their English which is pretty much equally understandable to everyone present except from the actual guys from Oxford, England.
Exactly! When I have to speak with actual English people, I do try my best to imitate a Americanised, TV show accent. When I speak to non-native speaker, I don't try and let my french go through. It's easier for everyone.
At some point I started to embrace my rolling Rs, "ze" all the way and rhyming passage and massage. But luckily I live at the bottom of the sea, where everyone is an English speaker, but nobody is a native.
Having grown up in two languages where dictée is a thing, I was always bemused by spelling bees. You have to spell one word? And have loads of time to do so? Pah!
To be fair, spelling bees usually have more complicated words (though the complicated ones are often borrowed from French anyway so, win-win for some of us).
While helping my children learn French spelling, I was horrified when I realized that there are 6 or 7 ways to write the sound [ɛ̃]:
un in (im) [i]en ain aim ein
The first one is pronounced with an O shape with the mouth (like you would do with the word oh), and the others with more of a smile shape (like with the word see). It’s impossible to pronounce one like the other.
I’m not a native English speaker and I gave up trying to pronounce th (father, through). Although I can hear the difference.
Yeah, this is my major difficulty with French, and it's even more difficult in colloquial spoken French which may drop entire syllables or words. I often find African pronunciations of French to be easier because they seem to pronounce each syllable distinctly.
I'm a native English speaker who became fluent in (québecois) french as an adult, I could not agree more. I have a better chance knowing how to pronounce a new word in french vs. English.
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.
Like, "passage" and "massage", why do they not rhyme in English? They're both borrowed French words! And don't even start me on how English pronounce "hangar"... that's like, what if you tried to pronounce this word as differently from the original as possible while still plausibly having the same spelling.
For anyone wondering, passage and massage entered English at very different times. Passage entered in middle english (around 13th century), while massage entered in the 19th century.
> 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.
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’m learning Japanese, which is overall a difficult language for a native English speaker to learn. However, the rules for pronunciation are comparatively a big relief, as is hiragana/katakana
To be fair, the "ghoti" joke is not about pronunciation but rather about the perceived mismatch between the way a word is written and the way it is spoken.
The most phonetically consistent language I know is Finnish. I believe there is exactly one way to pronounce every word and it's clear to all speakers.
Spanish also has that property, i.e. given a word (existing or invented), there is a single way to pronounce it, easy to determine following some rules.*
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.
The only problem with that is the vast number of declensions. Sure they're not as wildly divergent as, say Latin or Ancient Greek, and there's no gender, but because of all the cases there's a lot of subtle variations to remember
Spanish does have a few exceptions, mainly due to loanwords from indigenous American languages. For example, it would not be possible to guess that the X in México is pronounced like Spanish J.
> And the least phonetically consistent is English.
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.
Ugh, I'm triggered. The hardest part about learning French in school was these damn accents. I never quite got the rules and could not memorize the spellings, and so in my written tests I'd just randomly throw in some accent on some letter if I kinda remembered or, more often, guessed that one belonged in there somewhere.
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."
French person here : no differences, we pronounce them all é and we don't care.
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)
> French person here : no differences, we pronounce them all é and we don't care.
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.
> one current top show in France with French people on it got french subtitles
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.
> (is there a name for roughly "unaccented" Northeast/West Coast/DC English?)
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).
French in lots of regions in France has lost many distinctions in how things are pronounced. Paris french prononounces -en, -an, and -in almost or completely the same, for example.
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
French person here: there absolutely is a difference, at least in the "heard on TV" accent.
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)
Nice, thanks for sharing. Having been "accent shamed" in the past with Spanish*, I am a little terrified to try speaking foreign language in front of others. Hearing this makes me want to learn French (on top of plenty of other great reasons to learn it).
* 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
That's patently false in my dialect at the very least...
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.
You pronounce "fête" as "féte" (basically, equivalent to the English "faith" without the "h" sound at the end)?
To my hear these two sound very different.
> "féte" (basically, equivalent to the English "faith" without the "h" sound at the end)
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 fète would not have one I think (please correct me if I am wrong), and it is not the one in faith anyway.
Good point, I was trying to figure out how I would actually pronounce "féte". My main argument was that in any case, it wouldn't sound close to "fête" (or "fète"), which sound more like "faîte" in French -- as in "au faîte de sa popularité".
Ok, so what did I misunderstand in OP sentence "no differences, we pronounce them all é and we don't care."? "them" is not referring at all possible accentuation of the letter e?
> French person here : no differences, we pronounce them all é and we don't care.
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" ;)
And ê, when pronounced (most of the cases) it's just a è.
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.
Ambiguë (ambiguous) and aiguë (acute) [1], but these are "old" spellings.
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.
My first French teacher drew a picture of a smiling triangular-topped tombstone with long eyelashes on the blackboard, the word "acute" written up the left (ascending) side of the top and "grave" down the right hand side. A cute grave. Easy to remember. And fairly useless, since it doesn't help a whit with how to pronounce those accents.
I'm a non-native French speaker, but I am pretty confident that's not true. They are actually different sounds, not just the same sound at a different pitch.
French is not a tonal language like Chinese. Pitch is not used to distinguish between different phonemes.
"Hey", /ˈheɪ/, has a dipthong /eɪ/, so é is precisely the first half of that dipthong. It may feel like it's between the “e” in “bet” and “ee” in “see”, but using the dipthong you don't have to guess it.
Technically true, but this concept is foreign to English speakers. English relies heavily on diphthongs and can’t separate the sounds in their head. Simplest example is probably the word “no” which is very much a diphthong.
That’s why they always have such predictable accents in another language.
I've been speaking French since pre-school (albeit in North America mostly) and to me é always sounds more like the English short i (as in "tip"). I'm becoming increasingly convinced that everybody on Earth but me is wrong about it.
Do you happen to be from the western US or Canada? They tend to lower the /ɪ/ monophthong (i of tip, pit, sit, etc.) there, making it sound pretty close to /e/ (French é, German eh). It's one of those things that, combined with regionalisms and other accent features, give away where you grew up :) I noticed a lot of Londoners do this too, though this is just my experience.
I'm trying to get to B2/C1 in French and intend to move to France in 2028. Over the years I've picked up a little Spanish here, took a few years of German there, etc.
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.
> Ë with diaeresis is the easiest case to deal with. The diaeresis (the two dots) signifies that the underlying “e” is pronounced as /ɛ/ (as “e” in “bet”, i.e. the open e), no matter what comes around it, and is used in groups of vowels that would otherwise be pronounced differently.
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).
Yes "ambiguë" is pronounced exactly as if it was written "ambigu".
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.
Westernmost Eastern Europeans would do anything but use the actual script that makes sense for their language. How hard is it to just use с, ш, щ, ч and ц like civilized peoples.
The disagreements ITT at least answer the question I came away with after scanning this post—"if these are almost all pronounced the same, why the different diacriticals?"
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).
As a native in English speaker, I refuse to switch to the French keyboard when writing in French I just don’t bother with accents. Why can’t French just be normal and know how to pronounce words without any hints like we do in English?
100% agree with you on that one. And while we are it, now that we live in the computer age, why aren't we huffman-coding the whole language? that would be heck of a lot quicker instead of all slowing down to help the bunch of illiterates who can't remember the pronunciations.
I'm a native English speaker who's very exposed to French, but doesn't speak it, I find the use of accents in French very welcome to getting the pronunciation right when exposed to a new word. English is just a mess in comparison and I wish it had made use of accents as well to avoid a lot of the ambiguities in pronunciation. Perhaps some of the old English letters that are no longer in use helped a bit, but I'm not familiar enough with those to know if it used to be better.
You mean kinda like how (as I recently was informed) "ye olde" is actually pronounced "the old" but written "ye" because of printing issues, and consequently mispronounced by almost everyone?
Them be fighting words!
But as a native French speaker, I wholeheartedly agree that it is a tricky language. But there is so much pleasure in speaking it that I miss in English sometimes.
Fabrice Lucchini (an actor) is speaking about the language of Louis-Ferdinand Céline (an author from last century): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHrkC3vaqB8
Even if you do not speak French, I hope the passion comes through.
>Ê with the circumflex accent marks an “e” after which originally some other letter was written (usually an S), but this letter is no longer present in its modern spelling.
[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..."
I had that "a-ha" moment not at first by learning that "fenêtre" means "window", but later when I learned the German word is "Fenster".
> but later when I learned the German word is "Fenster".
Swedish word for it is strikingly similar, but with a hint of being more "hip and trendy restaurant in gentrified neighborhood": Fönster.
Or defenestrate...
I love that the existence of this word implies being thrown out of a window was so common it required its own word
A uniquely... English word, that.
It originated in Prague due to two incidents:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestration#Origin
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestrations_of_Prague
Also used in Italian and presumably in many other languages.
Like with any word, it's use in colloquial form may vary from generation to generation, from subculture to subculture etc
Not at all. It's just the Latin prefix "de" (out of) plus "fenester" meaning window. Not an English word except by borrowing.
In italian finestra
As a native (Québécois) French speaker who's been living in the US for most of my adult life, something I miss from French is that once you've learned the (many) rules, you can be pretty confident about how to pronounce a given word.
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.
French and English are roughly on par for how terrible they are at this.
Relevant concept here is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth
Source: native French speaker and professional translator.
Native English speaker, but yes this is something I love about Spanish. There are rules to learn (sometimes quite variable depending on Mexico vs. Spain, etc) but once you learn them, pronunciation is usually pretty confident.
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 would say I agree. That being said, my experience is biased from working in Big Tech where the accents are on such a wide spectrum that people have no choice but to develop a "flexible" ear.
I think you're right that working in certain areas (geographical or professional) gives you an ability to grasp all kinds of English.
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.
Yep, a common anecdote from European science conferences is that by the second day, everybody do settle into the thick, averaged Spanish/German/French/Italian/Russian accent of their English which is pretty much equally understandable to everyone present except from the actual guys from Oxford, England.
Exactly! When I have to speak with actual English people, I do try my best to imitate a Americanised, TV show accent. When I speak to non-native speaker, I don't try and let my french go through. It's easier for everyone.
At some point I started to embrace my rolling Rs, "ze" all the way and rhyming passage and massage. But luckily I live at the bottom of the sea, where everyone is an English speaker, but nobody is a native.
The other way – trying to spell a word you hear – is harder, since many sounds have multiple possible spellings. Hence la dictée.
Having grown up in two languages where dictée is a thing, I was always bemused by spelling bees. You have to spell one word? And have loads of time to do so? Pah!
To be fair, spelling bees usually have more complicated words (though the complicated ones are often borrowed from French anyway so, win-win for some of us).
While helping my children learn French spelling, I was horrified when I realized that there are 6 or 7 ways to write the sound [ɛ̃]: un in (im) [i]en ain aim ein
Gotta get it right or you'll order some wind instead of some wine. (Did that once, and that's how the difference finally stuck for me.)
What did the server bring to your table? A fan?
They understood what I meant, and then the French folks I was with had a long discussion with me about how it's not the same sound.
The first one (un) is different from the others.
So I've been told... but I could never hear the difference myself!
Arguably so is “aim/ein etc” and “in”, though more dialect dependent and more subtle.
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”
The first one is pronounced with an O shape with the mouth (like you would do with the word oh), and the others with more of a smile shape (like with the word see). It’s impossible to pronounce one like the other.
I’m not a native English speaker and I gave up trying to pronounce th (father, through). Although I can hear the difference.
This has to be a regionalism because there're strictly identical to me, eg. in "Un train." /œ̃tʁɛ̃/ I say the two vowels exactly the same way.
After a cursory search it seems my Parisian-ish accent is at fault: https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Annexe:Prononciation/fran%C3%...
> I’m not a native English speaker and I gave up trying to pronounce th (father, through). Although I can hear the difference.
Why can't the Québécois count to four? Because there is a tree in the way.
Yeah, this is my major difficulty with French, and it's even more difficult in colloquial spoken French which may drop entire syllables or words. I often find African pronunciations of French to be easier because they seem to pronounce each syllable distinctly.
I'm a native English speaker who became fluent in (québecois) french as an adult, I could not agree more. I have a better chance knowing how to pronounce a new word in french vs. English.
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".
Gruau would be closer to grew-oh, if it helps.
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.
Like, "passage" and "massage", why do they not rhyme in English? They're both borrowed French words! And don't even start me on how English pronounce "hangar"... that's like, what if you tried to pronounce this word as differently from the original as possible while still plausibly having the same spelling.
For anyone wondering, passage and massage entered English at very different times. Passage entered in middle english (around 13th century), while massage entered in the 19th century.
> 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.
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’m learning Japanese, which is overall a difficult language for a native English speaker to learn. However, the rules for pronunciation are comparatively a big relief, as is hiragana/katakana
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
It's my go-to (pun intended) whenever a native English speaker complains about other languages being "hard to pronounce" :)
To be fair, the "ghoti" joke is not about pronunciation but rather about the perceived mismatch between the way a word is written and the way it is spoken.
The most phonetically consistent language I know is Finnish. I believe there is exactly one way to pronounce every word and it's clear to all speakers.
And the least phonetically consistent is English.
Spanish also has that property, i.e. given a word (existing or invented), there is a single way to pronounce it, easy to determine following some rules.*
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.
> a single way to pronounce it
Within a particular dialect, that is.
The only problem with that is the vast number of declensions. Sure they're not as wildly divergent as, say Latin or Ancient Greek, and there's no gender, but because of all the cases there's a lot of subtle variations to remember
Sure; this has nothing to do with the way written words are spoken, though.
Spanish does have a few exceptions, mainly due to loanwords from indigenous American languages. For example, it would not be possible to guess that the X in México is pronounced like Spanish J.
You do not guess, you learn.
Finnish is not unique in that it has quite a few dialects like most other languages.
> And the least phonetically consistent is English.
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.
With the exception of some annoying ones like "fils" (son or sons) and "fils" (threads).
Or "est" (he is) and "est" (the East) although English also has plenty of such "non-homophonic homographs"...
Ugh, I'm triggered. The hardest part about learning French in school was these damn accents. I never quite got the rules and could not memorize the spellings, and so in my written tests I'd just randomly throw in some accent on some letter if I kinda remembered or, more often, guessed that one belonged in there somewhere.
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."
French person here : no differences, we pronounce them all é and we don't care.
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)
> French person here : no differences, we pronounce them all é and we don't care.
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.
> ... but claiming that your particular pronunciation is the one true way is ridiculous.
Ah, so you're not Parisian.
> one current top show in France with French people on it got french subtitles
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.
Like that scene in Hot Fuzz where they go out to talk to the farmer about cutting his neighbor's hedge, and they need a translator for the translator
I think "General American English" is the term for that.
> (is there a name for roughly "unaccented" Northeast/West Coast/DC English?)
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).
> French person here : no differences, we pronounce them all é and we don't care.
No we don’t, wtf
é and è (as well as e but it goes without saying) are very clearly distinct sounds.
French in lots of regions in France has lost many distinctions in how things are pronounced. Paris french prononounces -en, -an, and -in almost or completely the same, for example.
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
French person here: there absolutely is a difference, at least in the "heard on TV" accent.
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)
Nice, thanks for sharing. Having been "accent shamed" in the past with Spanish*, I am a little terrified to try speaking foreign language in front of others. Hearing this makes me want to learn French (on top of plenty of other great reasons to learn it).
* 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
That's patently false in my dialect at the very least...
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.
Non. Personne ne prononce tous les accents de la même manière.
You pronounce "fête" as "féte" (basically, equivalent to the English "faith" without the "h" sound at the end)? To my hear these two sound very different.
> "féte" (basically, equivalent to the English "faith" without the "h" sound at the end)
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 fète would not have one I think (please correct me if I am wrong), and it is not the one in faith anyway.
Good point, I was trying to figure out how I would actually pronounce "féte". My main argument was that in any case, it wouldn't sound close to "fête" (or "fète"), which sound more like "faîte" in French -- as in "au faîte de sa popularité".
> You pronounce "fête" as "féte"?
No, they don’t.
Ok, so what did I misunderstand in OP sentence "no differences, we pronounce them all é and we don't care."? "them" is not referring at all possible accentuation of the letter e?
> French person here :
I could guess that solely from the space before ':'
> no differences, we pronounce them all é and we don't care.
Non.
Many Americans turn on subtitles when watching tv/movies
Gone are the days when American actors flaunted those crisply enunciated albeit preposterous "continental" accents
subtitles aren't only about accents. Have you heard the audio mixes in entertainment?
> French person here : no differences, we pronounce them all é and we don't care.
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" ;)
If there's one thing I wish someone pointed out when I was just starting learning French is this:
That's it. That's how it should be explained.* It's also in their names - aigu and grave, but this requires knowing what these words mean.
And ê, when pronounced (most of the cases) it's just a è.
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.
> ë
What else is there with ë except for Noël and Israël ?
Ambiguë (ambiguous) and aiguë (acute) [1], but these are "old" spellings.
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
[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ambig%C3%BCe
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C3%A9ma_en_fran%C3%A7ais Some adjectives: aiguë, exiguë... (though a bunch are more commonly written with it on the ü instead) Some proper names: Gaël, Gwenaël, Ismaël
> That's it. That's how it should be explained.
That's contingent on your ability to imagine sounds doing ups and downs.
Probably more on imaging / as going up and \ as going down.
I'd think that associating pitch increase/decrease with up/down works for the vast majority of people without any second thought.
My first French teacher drew a picture of a smiling triangular-topped tombstone with long eyelashes on the blackboard, the word "acute" written up the left (ascending) side of the top and "grave" down the right hand side. A cute grave. Easy to remember. And fairly useless, since it doesn't help a whit with how to pronounce those accents.
I'm a non-native French speaker, but I am pretty confident that's not true. They are actually different sounds, not just the same sound at a different pitch.
French is not a tonal language like Chinese. Pitch is not used to distinguish between different phonemes.
> Ë with diaeresis is the easiest case to deal with
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!
"Hey", /ˈheɪ/, has a dipthong /eɪ/, so é is precisely the first half of that dipthong. It may feel like it's between the “e” in “bet” and “ee” in “see”, but using the dipthong you don't have to guess it.
Technically true, but this concept is foreign to English speakers. English relies heavily on diphthongs and can’t separate the sounds in their head. Simplest example is probably the word “no” which is very much a diphthong.
That’s why they always have such predictable accents in another language.
I've been speaking French since pre-school (albeit in North America mostly) and to me é always sounds more like the English short i (as in "tip"). I'm becoming increasingly convinced that everybody on Earth but me is wrong about it.
Do you happen to be from the western US or Canada? They tend to lower the /ɪ/ monophthong (i of tip, pit, sit, etc.) there, making it sound pretty close to /e/ (French é, German eh). It's one of those things that, combined with regionalisms and other accent features, give away where you grew up :) I noticed a lot of Londoners do this too, though this is just my experience.
No, you are correct.
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
They're extremely close! /ɪ/ literally sits next to /e/ on the vowel chart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_diagram#/media/File%3AIP...
Only if your accent is relatively close to General American or Standard Canadian :)
I'm trying to get to B2/C1 in French and intend to move to France in 2028. Over the years I've picked up a little Spanish here, took a few years of German there, etc.
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
Is it even possible to actually learn the language without living in the environment, where it gets in your face all the time?
Yes. Linguists do that all the time. People do learn Latin, etc.
You may enjoy the book Latin alive, for me it was a revelation on how the romance languages diverged and took their present forms.
> Ë with diaeresis is the easiest case to deal with. The diaeresis (the two dots) signifies that the underlying “e” is pronounced as /ɛ/ (as “e” in “bet”, i.e. the open e), no matter what comes around it, and is used in groups of vowels that would otherwise be pronounced differently.
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).
Yes "ambiguë" is pronounced exactly as if it was written "ambigu".
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.
As one dabbling in Mandarin, this french e, è, é, ê, ë thing makes me chuckle. Mā mà mǎ ma? (Is Mom scolding the horse?)
Polish s, ś, sz, z, ź, ż, rz, c, ć, cz, si, zi, ci – what's the difference?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47533035
:)
Much simpler, IMHO
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
Westernmost Eastern Europeans would do anything but use the actual script that makes sense for their language. How hard is it to just use с, ш, щ, ч and ц like civilized peoples.
The disagreements ITT at least answer the question I came away with after scanning this post—"if these are almost all pronounced the same, why the different diacriticals?"
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).
all the same after a little transliteration
Learning about any other language just shows the supremacy of the Hungarian alphabet.
Multiple digraphs, a _trigraph_ and then accents too? Ugh. The real best alphabet is something like Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, IMO.
If the ‘e’ is pronounced ‘ah’ then just change the damn spelling of the word to reflect it then.
Cela fait il encore sens?
As a native in English speaker, I refuse to switch to the French keyboard when writing in French I just don’t bother with accents. Why can’t French just be normal and know how to pronounce words without any hints like we do in English?
100% agree with you on that one. And while we are it, now that we live in the computer age, why aren't we huffman-coding the whole language? that would be heck of a lot quicker instead of all slowing down to help the bunch of illiterates who can't remember the pronunciations.
It's actually the French who are being normal. And the rest of European part of Indo-European language speakers.
Une langue qui se simplifie sans arrêt n’est pas systématiquement meilleure.
Cough, though, tough, ...
Good luck guessing the pronounciation just gotta learn it. Clearly the superior system.
cough: la tout (f.) Or un toussement (m.)
Actually, if they used accents to denote, whether a word was male or female, I would be totally down.
French is such a shitty language. I've been learning Polish lately and every word is spoken exactly as you write it. A real breath of fresh air.
I'm a native English speaker who's very exposed to French, but doesn't speak it, I find the use of accents in French very welcome to getting the pronunciation right when exposed to a new word. English is just a mess in comparison and I wish it had made use of accents as well to avoid a lot of the ambiguities in pronunciation. Perhaps some of the old English letters that are no longer in use helped a bit, but I'm not familiar enough with those to know if it used to be better.
You mean kinda like how (as I recently was informed) "ye olde" is actually pronounced "the old" but written "ye" because of printing issues, and consequently mispronounced by almost everyone?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_olde
Them be fighting words! But as a native French speaker, I wholeheartedly agree that it is a tricky language. But there is so much pleasure in speaking it that I miss in English sometimes. Fabrice Lucchini (an actor) is speaking about the language of Louis-Ferdinand Céline (an author from last century): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHrkC3vaqB8 Even if you do not speak French, I hope the passion comes through.
Cześć!
That's more of an orthographic problem than a language problem.