need the accent, and I’ve often heard it pronounced jocularly to rhyme with safe. Touché, on the other hand, has a very limited use. It arises in the sport of fencing, so it’s a technical term in origin, and used to mean a hit metaphorically. It seems really odd to me to spell it without the accent.
The words café and résumé are originally French, and in English we often write those words without the accents. In French, however, the accent marks are not optional. French has several different accent marks, also known as “diacritics”. They serve several different purposes in the language.
How do you type an accent over cafe? In café, the accent goes over the e. It’s not possible to add an accent to an e after you’ve typed it. The solution is that you can insert an “é” using the symbol function. If you see a button on your toolbar that looks like a horseshoe, that’s the button you use for inserting symbols.
Words adopted from foreign languages sometimes carry their accent marks with them, as in “fiancé, ” “protégé,” and “cliché.” As words become more at home in English, they tend to shed the marks: “Café” is often spelled “cafe.”
In NA cafe and coffee shop are pretty much synonymous. Now, is a cafe an accentless café or an abbreviated cafeteria? If its customers refer to it as the caif or the caff, the latter. Click to expand In NA this really doesn’t ring true. Most cafes just serve coffee (one sort, plus, maybe, decaf for wusses).
What is the most important thing about using accents?
After you’ve decided on the authority you’re going to look to for guidance, the most important thing about using accents is to be consistent.
Well, it matters if you want your readers to have a good reading experience. Any part of your writing that strikes your readers as inconsistent distracts them from your words and their meaning. So the reason you should take notice of accents is to make sure your readers don’t have to!
Often, the term ‘accents’ is used colloquially for all of them, and that’s the term we’ll adopt here. Be aware that they are also sometimes lumped in with ‘foreign characters’ – letters and other characters that are entirely distinct from those that make up written English.
You will see that it suggests ‘ appliqué ’, with the accent, but ‘ cafe ’, unaccented. The distinction is probably because ‘cafe’ is common enough for most people to know that it’s pronounced with two syllables, whereas ‘appliqué’ is less common. However, just in case you’re still attached to writing ‘café’ in the older way, with its accent intact, Oxford Dictionaries allows that usage too – ‘ (also café)’ – and even includes it in its example sentences.
Word also has some advanced features that can help with checking accents. For example, you can set them to appear in a specific colour to make them easier to spot. However, even with a few savvy tricks up your sleeve, it’s obvious that checking your accents, especially across a long and complex document, can turn into a lengthy and labour-intensive process. There is a better way.
What’s more, dictionaries can disagree even on common words like this. If you take a trip across the Atlantic, you will see that Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary gives ‘café’ as its default, but the variant ‘ cafe ’ is allowed as well.
What is the accent above an e?
The Acute Accent (L’Accent Aigu) in French. The acute accent is only ever found above an “e”, as in “é”. Its role is to change the pronunciation of the vowel. An unaccented “e” can be pronounced several different ways, but when you see “é”, there’s no ambiguity. An é (e with an acute accent) is always pronounced the same way.
1. The Cedilla (La Cédille) in French. The cedilla in French looks like a little squiggle beneath the letter “c”: “ç”. This accent mark only goes with the letter “c” — it’s not found under any other letter. It’s a simple symbol to understand: a ç (c with a cedilla) is pronounced like an “s”.
To type a vowel with a trema press Ctrl + `, then the vowel. If that doesn’t work, you can try inputting the character code directly. Each accented character can be entered with a four-digit code. Simply press the “alt” key, then enter the French accent codes below.
The French “é” is the first of the two vowel sounds that make up the English “ay” diphthong. To pronounce “é” accurately, position your tongue like you’re about to say “ay”, but once you start making noise, don’t move your tongue or lips. Keep them steady for the entire duration of the sound.
Above an “a” or a “u”, a grave accent doesn’t change the pronunciation. Above an “e”, however, it tells you that the vowel is pronounced “eh”, like the “e” in “get” (IPA /). There are many ways to pronounce an unaccented “e” in French.
In French, however, the accent marks are not optional. French has several different accent marks, also known as “diacritics”. They serve several different purposes in the language. Sometimes they affect pronunciation, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they can completely change the meaning of a word.
That covers it! As you can see, the accent rules are a bit complicated, but they’re not impossible. Remember that they don’t always affect pronunciation: so if your focus is speaking, not every accent rule needs to be studied in great detail just yet.
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