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By the way, diacritic is my word of the week, fighting off tough competition from glyph. And as I said, we don't use many in written English, unlike our continental cousins in France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Sweden with their acutes, angstroms, breves, cedillas, circumflexes, diaereses (aka umlauts), graves, macrons and tildes.
In fact, I could only find use of one diacritic in native English. That's the diaeresis, two dots above a letter where there's a double vowel, as in coöperative, daïs, naïve or reëlect, to make sure that both vowels are sounded independently, and even that is dying a rapid death in favour of the helpful hyphen (co-operative, re-elect) or of nothing at all (dais, naive). How to pronounce those last two without diacritic direction?
The majority of words in common English usage employing accents have all been imported from our afore-mentioned neighbours. These are sometimes termed 'loan' words. And even then, it seems to have been a matter of chance whether the accents they came with have survived the incorporation or not, with culinary words putting up the greatest resistance to having their diacritics lopped off.
Let me illustrate. We still write blasé, café, cliché, exposé, façade, fête, frappé, latté, piñata, résumé, rosé, soufflé, soupçon, über and Zoë - mostly with but admittedly sometimes without their accents - but a word like hotel (originally hôtel from the French) ditched its circumflex long ago, just like cote and rote have done; and when we inducted cañón (from the Spanish) we turned it into canyon. The prognosis for accents on words in English usage appears to be changing from acute to grave.😯
I didn't know whether I could follow that brief essay on accent and pronunciation with a poem of any substance, but as I didn't write one for last week's blog, I felt duty-bound to give it a go today. It's a sonnet of sorts to a rhyme-scheme of my own devising (ABBACDDCEFFEGG). It's also an exercise in the use of diacritics (at least one in every line). And each verse commences with a different personal pronoun. You'll decide, after all that, if it has any merit or not.
Frappé
I clearly stated we were being naïve
to take his résumé at face value.
You felt it looked too clichéd to be true
but wouldn't back me up with Geneviève.
He was an émigré from some régime
for God's sake. How ingénue could Gen be?
She seemed blasé, her mind made up, so we
had no choice. This über would lead our team.
It wasn't too long before the soufflé
went splat. Coöperation is the rule
we live by - not a soupçon from the fool
fêted by our boss. Children died that day.
They were taking refuge in the café,
all blown away to his chilling olé!
Thanks for reading, S ;-)
10 comments:
You're so clever young Steve. You should have been a teacher. Oh, wait... 😂
Funny and informative. 👏
Interesting. In Greece most diacritics were discontinued in the last century. Only the acute accent and the diaeresis remain. Also, did you know that café frappé, using instant coffee, was invented here at the Thessaloniki International Fair of 1957? A representative of Nestlé company, Giannis Dritsas, was exhibiting a new product for children. It was a chocolate drink produced instantly by mixing it with milk and shaking it in a shaker. Dritsas' employee, Dimitris Vakondios, was looking for a way to have his usual instant coffee during his break but could not find any hot water. So he mixed the coffee with cold water and ice cubes in a shaker.
A fascinating fact about café frappé, Lois. Sadly my coffee-drinking days are behind me.
Interesting about the demise of written accents. I didn't know they were called diacritics. And what a cleverly disguised sonnet. Très bon! 👍
Bravo Steve. Education and entertainment in equal measure.
Loan words is a good expression. We think of written accents as being foreign and I don't use them when I write words like cafe and naive. I don't see that as a problem because so much of our pronunciation is learned from what we hear said rather than from the written word... otherwise we'd all be pronouncing cafe as if it rhymed with safe! Clever poem.
Instructive and wittily done. I like the quizzical Frenchman and the clever sonnet. I raise my châpeau! 😉
Not something I'd ever given any thought to, but it's quite interesting that written English is mostly unaccented (except for the loan words, as you say). The poem was is a clever and amusing exercise - until the killer last line, that is.
Nice one Steve.
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