All these damned accents!
Posted by Ellie Rosier on Saturday, April 28, 2012
April 28, 2012
How long is the French language going to keep up with accents?
I have had a long, unending battle with trying to uphold the standards of accentuation in French and other languages. It's rather easy if you're using a dedicated word processor with a keyboard with its full complement of keys. Since I hate changing the configuration of the keyboard, it can become more of a challenge to switch between various accented languages. A laptop keyboard may demand a bit more acrobatics with key combinations and a touch screen device such as an Iphone or Android will require a whole new set of skills.
The history behind accents is quite fascinating.
For instance, you may have asked yourself, why all these little hats on French vowels, circumflex accents in grammatical terms. Most of the time, vowels with such accents used to be followed, in old French, by the letter s and mostly belong to words with a latin origin:
hôpital --> hospital / ospital (latin: hospitalis)
hôtel --> hostel / oste (latin: hospitale)
pâté --> pasté (latin: pasta [flour paste])
I have had a long, unending battle with trying to uphold the standards of accentuation in French and other languages. It's rather easy if you're using a dedicated word processor with a keyboard with its full complement of keys. Since I hate changing the configuration of the keyboard, it can become more of a challenge to switch between various accented languages. A laptop keyboard may demand a bit more acrobatics with key combinations and a touch screen device such as an Iphone or Android will require a whole new set of skills.
The history behind accents is quite fascinating.
For instance, you may have asked yourself, why all these little hats on French vowels, circumflex accents in grammatical terms. Most of the time, vowels with such accents used to be followed, in old French, by the letter s and mostly belong to words with a latin origin:
hôpital --> hospital / ospital (latin: hospitalis)
hôtel --> hostel / oste (latin: hospitale)
pâté --> pasté (latin: pasta [flour paste])
