What English words other than naïve and rôle have accents?
Edited 7h ago
@david_chisnall I was not aware that those had accents in English (but then I'm not a native speaker).
Does pokémon count?
@david_chisnall Café? Fiancé/fiancée?
FWIW, the ï in naïve is technically a diaresis, indicating that subsequent vowels should be pronounced as distinct syllables, not as a diphthong; whereas an accent modifies the pronunciation of the vowel. (Which doesn‘t make much sense in English anyway, with no clear “default” phonetic mapping.)
Edited 7h ago
@david_chisnall Pretty much any if you grew up outside of a small part of privileged society.
Oh, on the *letters*.
Ah. As you were.
@david_chisnall my rule of thumb is to put "le" in front of any otherwise ordinary English word and then the latter must be spoken in a terrible French accent. like: le terrible; le basketball; le weapon
oh the other kind of accent. nevermind!
@david_chisnall entrée, used in english with the wrong meaning
@david_chisnall Well, there’s also café and fête (clearly showing that it is pronounced fête and not “féte”!), just for starters, but it could be argued that these are borrowings from other languages and perhaps not entirely English words…
@david_chisnall Most of the examples in the other replies are words borrowed from other languages. Whether the accent comes along for the ride is a matter of style. Many borrowed words lose their accents in English, or at least American English.
Your example of “naïve” uses a diaeresis (ok, a diacritic mark, not an accent, as another respondent pointed out) to distinguish two separate vowels from a vowel digraph. Other examples are coöperate, coördinate, reënact, reënlist, etc.
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@davecykl @david_chisnall The ê has nothing to do with pronunciation anyway. It's only put onto vowels that were followed by an S in ancient French but aren't anymore today. Like hôtel. The German word "Fest" still has that S.
Does English have any words at all that aren't stolen from Latin, French or German...?
Does English have any words at all that aren't stolen from Latin, French or German...?
Sure. We're not fussy about where we steal words from.
@simon Only in American, not in English.
@ptrchas3 @david_chisnall the bit in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical_marks#Native_English_words which mentions coöperative is interesting to me- I have a colleague who is vocal about writing noöne to improve "regularity of pronunciation". I think he's right, but when did English ever care about making pronunciation clear?
I hadn’t seen that spelling of coöperative before this thread and it is my new favourite thing. I will continue to pronounce it as cewpreactive if people don’t use ö.
@coder @ptrchas3 @david_chisnall Surely noone is usually written no one or more commonly no-one?
I was not aware that those had accents in English (but then I'm not a native speaker).
Some dictionaries list them as ‘archaic’ spellings, but we don’t like their sort around here.