French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?

>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.

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)

If there's one thing I wish someone pointed out when I was just starting learning French is this:

  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.

> 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.

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).

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

> 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).

all the same after a little transliteration

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

:)

Learning about any other language just shows the supremacy of the Hungarian alphabet.

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?

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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.