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I had always subliminally (but nearer to my mind's conscious 'part'!) thought that why we pronounce acute accent as /eɪ/, but had never come up with the idea of posing it here. Well, last night I did! 🙂
Mostly the words containing the accent have been borrowed from French, far as I know, and they, the French, pronounce it as /e/, the 'accent aigu'.
Is it rooted in some older version of English? Or in Latin?
They are all borrowed words, no exception !
A weird point: does English take liberty to add accent ? Yes: saké. Japanese writing doesn't even have the concept of the accent as the alphabets know it. Except possibly saké originated from one of the accented European languages. No way to prove either way.
Raffee said
RobertB said:
They are all borrowed words, no exception !
Yes, but my main point was that why we pronounce it as /eɪ/, and not /e/, as the French do.
/e/ is very, very rare in mainstream American or British English. And /e/ is definitely not a separate phoneme in English—at most it might be an allophone of /eɪ/. In fact, most people I know will not even be able to understand the difference if I try to demonstrate the difference between /ne/ and /neɪ/.
When reading the posts, a question crossed my mind. Why did English borrow so many words from French? Is it beacuse of the Norman Conquest in about the year 1066? Yeah, language contact is quite normal but English seems to have taken and adapted too many words from French. Recently I came across an article where was stated that
"between 1100 and 1500 more than ten thousand French words passed into English" [StojiÄić V.(2004) Sociolinguistic Stimuli to Development of the English Lexicon - Language Contact and Social Need, p. 31, http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=ru&as_sdt=0,5&q=V.+Stojicic+sociolinguistic+factors+in+the+creations].
It is common knowledge that English borrowed words from many world dead and living languages, but French borrowings seem to be great in number. Why so?
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
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