[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..."

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.

  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.

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)

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

1) locate and focus at the difficult parts of each (eg English phrasal verbs, French accent, German grammar)

2) realise the huge similarity between euro languages and leverage it

3) increase my confidence in deeper learning

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!

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."

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).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47533035

:)

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).