And, likewise, no need to vocalize the “e” on the end of ciguë (i.e., hemlock), but hopefully you won’t have too much cause to say, “Excuse me, while I swallow a little hemlock here.”Īs for the other three accents. “ Aigu” and “ aiguë”-the male and female version of “acute” -are pronounced the same way. ![]() Not fully, as the tréma, which indicates a double vowel sound, is also used to mute a vowel. I thought I had grasped the tréma’s purpose, but I had not. Then, for clarification, I reached out to Artie Greenspan, professor emeritus of French at Colby College, in Maine.įirst, as Greenspan quickly made me aware, your diacritics can be multi-taskers. ![]() They might announce their raison d’être to other language learners, but they didn’t to me, so I finally sat down and learned about the diacritics, thanks to my good friend, the Internet. The three remaining accents were where I ran into problems. It indicates that the vowel before the vowel with the tréma and the actual vowel crowned with the tréma are to be pronounced as two separate sounds. Turns out, the tréma over the “e” is there to remind us to do just that. I claim this only because, in the past, when I was feeling Christmas-y and sang, “Noël, Noël,” I managed to pronounce the word as “no-ell” and not “knoll.” I mean: I saw those two neighborly vowels and made two sounds. I also intuitively understood the tréma (the accent mark that consists of double dots over a vowel). Like the purpose of the cedilla, i.e., that little squiggle under a “c.” It’s a head’s up that garçon is pronounced with an “s” sound instead of as “gar-kon.” Just as “ façade” is not “fa-kad.” You don’t really need to be studying French to know this. Which is to say: Either with difficulty or a foolish little mnemonic device. Still, I dutifully memorized where they went, in the same way I memorized the gender of words. ![]() I’m a fussbudget about grammar and punctuation in English, so I intended to be the same in French, even though I only partially understood what the accent marks were for.
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