Quote:
Originally Posted by tore
The english language has sloppy use of vowels. You guys need more letters for the sounds you make.  |
No kidding! I speak French as well so I realized that a long time ago. In French there are so many more sounds a vowel can make than there is in English, and most of the time, each sound has it's own representation with these diacritics: acute accent (é), grave accent (è), circumflex (
ê), umlaut (ë) (also called a diaeresis). Those diacritics can be placed on any vowel depending on the word, it's tense, whether it's masculine or feminine, etc. Also used occasionally, and only on the letter C, is the cedilla (ç). The cedilla is used in French to indicate that the letter "c" is to be pronounced as an "s" - as in Français. You also see the use of ligatures (Æ, Œ). Æ (æ) is used mainly for words with Latin roots - it's pretty rare otherwise. Œ (œ), on the other hand, is used much more frequently, for example in œuf (egg), sœur (sister), and bœuf (beef).