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

Post by ivm » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 8:24 PM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #104

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spanish also has that property, i.e. given a word (existing or invented), there is a single way to pronounce it, easy to determine following some rules.* Finnish (from what I've heard, as I don't speak it) is even more regular in the sense that this also works the other way around, i.e., if you hear a word, you can use rules to know how to spell it. This does not always hold in Spanish (e.g. B and V are pronounced th…

Spanish does have a few exceptions, mainly due to loanwords from indigenous American languages. For example, it would not be possible to guess that the X in México is pronounced like Spanish J.

Post by sevenseacat » Sat, Mar 28, 2026, 6:16 AM UTC

moribvndvs wrote: post #108

strongpigeon wrote: post #5

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…

I’m learning Japanese, which is overall a difficult language for a native English speaker to learn. However, the rules for pronunciation are comparatively a big relief, as is hiragana/katakana

Post by QuercusMax » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 10:23 PM UTC

cryptonector wrote: post #134

QuercusMax wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. It's just the Latin prefix "de" (out of) plus "fenester" meaning window. Not an English word except by borrowing.

The joke was that [to my then knowledge] it's not used in Romance languages, but it is used in English.