How To Differentiate É, È, Ê, and Ë,in French?
When it’s come to learn new language, the first thing to do is you must know the alphabet and how to pronounce it. It’s a must thing too with French language which contain 26 Latin characters. One of those is letter E and it has variations or change depends on the word itself into é, è, ê and ë. Now, take a look why the letter can transform into four types and the pronunciation!
- The É (e with L’accent aigu)
We found this é commonly used in French words. The place of this accent is above the e vowel and pronounced as /e/. L’accent aigu used when the pronunciation of letter e needs to be clearly sound.
To pronounce this é letter, we can refer in the first letter of elephant in English or écouter (to hear) in French.
2. The È (e with L’accent grave)
L’accent grave commonly happen when the e letter is placed between consonant letters in one word. The function of this accent is to mark the e letter into [ɛ] pronunciation. Not only in e letter, this can also use in other vowels like a and u.
The example to use of this accent can be pronounced as in word très (very) or get in English.
3. The Ê (e with L’accent circonflexe)
Not only placed in letter e, but this accent can also be found in other vowels, â, î, û, and ô. At first the old French using the s letter in a word, but as time goes by, they didn’t sound it. So, this pointy-hat-like accent letter is used for replacing it and become the silent letter.
This accent is also to indicate the long pronunciation. For example, the word forêt is sharing same root as English, forest. But the French did not pronounce the s letter instead replace it with e circonflexe.
4. The Ë (e with diaeresis or tréma)
This could happen because in one word found two vowels contiguous. When we meet this letter in a word, we must pronounce it separately from an adjacent vowel. Often, we pronounce a French word one time, or we could say monophthong. But with this Ë, it feels like we separate them.
For example, the word mais will be pronounce [mɛ], it means ‘but’. That vocabulary will have different meaning and pronunciation when we change to maïs ‘corn’ as sounded as [ma.is].
Sources:
https://jakubmarian.com/french-e-e-e-e-e-whats-the-difference/
https://effectivelanguagelearning.com/free-language-lessons/french/lesson-3/
https://ifalpes.com/blog/accents-in-the-french-alphabet/
https://www.frenchspanishonline.com/magazine/french-accents-aigu-grave-circonflexe/
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