Latté or latte? – reëvaluating diacritics

latte

By Sophie Shields

Autocorrect has a funny habit of adding extra marks to my words: hotel becomes hôtel, pinata becomes piñata and expose becomes exposé. From à to á, â, ä and ã, these powerful little marks are known as diacritics, symbols which indicate a change in vowel pronunciation. But where do they come from and why is autocorrect so insistent on adding them to English? A language without diacritics, right?

Let’s start with the tale of the Spanish tilde – ñ. Invented by Spanish scribes in the 12th century, the tilde made copying Latin manuscripts quicker by shortening double letters. Latin’s annus soon became Spanish’s año (year)! A similar literary history exists for the well-known German umlaut (ä, ö, ü), which was popularized by one of the Brothers Grimm in the 1800s. Literally meaning an “around sound”, the umlaut indicates that a vowel is affected by the following vowel in a word, think Häagen-Dazs and Iögo. In other cases, diacritics are leftovers of history. French’s circumflex accent (â) indicates that the vowel was once followed by an “s”: être was estre and hôpital was hospital. The origin of other diacritics remains less clear, with the common acute (á) and grave (à) accents likely coming from Ancient Greek.

For the average English speaker, diacritics might sound rather irrelevant, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. How else would you distinguish your rose from rosé, a divorce from a divorcé and the verb expose from an exposé? The New Yorker, for instance, lives by diaeresis –two dots, often-confused with the umlaut, going above the second vowel to form a separate syllable. Words like coördinate and reëlect are hidden all over their pages! Nowadays, diacritics are so trendy that we sometimes even throw in extra ones: latté has no é in Italian and resumé is spelled résumé in French. But wouldn’t you much rather be having a tête-à-tête over a latté at a café than a tete-a-tete over a latte at a cafe? I sure would. So, maybe our predictable diacritic-free English language needs reëvaluating – a few extra symbols would add a sophisticated pizzazz to our everyday writing. Touché?

 

Sophie Shields is a Carleton student studying global literature and a proud Franco-Ukrainian. She is the social media coordinator for the Glebe Report.

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