The French word for “enamel” is émail, with an acute accent on the e. To avoid confusion, the French use courriel or simply le mail to denote those electronic missives. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Email Enamel”
Fred DeRosa from Ottawa, Canada sent us another linguistic false friend.
The French word for enamel looks just like the English word for email, only it has an accent on the e.
Right, it’s got the acute accent on the e, right?
-huh.
Yeah.
That’s one of the reasons why they didn’t really borrow email to refer to digital mail, because of that confusion, and they use courriel or le mail or other things instead.
Beware the linguistic false friends.
