4 ms·
The accent isn't there to make it look exotic, it's there to clarify the pronunciation. English steals é from French, not Spanish. Without the accent it wouldn'
by lukeschlather 9y ago
The accent isn't there to make it look exotic, it's there to clarify the pronunciation. English steals é from French, not Spanish. Without the accent it wouldn't be obvious that it's supposed to be an ae diphthong. (Obviously it's still non-obvious, but it's a reasonable spelling.)
- ggambetta 9y agoHmm. Makes sense, but I'm not convinced. Borrowing an é from French also doesn't give you the correct pronunciation, since the French and the Spanish é sound different (and since Spanish does have an accented e, it makes the whole thing more confusing!). It's MAT-eh, not mat-AY. And now I feel a bit like Hermione Granger :(
- lukeschlather 9y agoIt gives you the correct English pronunciation. The point isn't to make a perfect phonentic alphabet, it's to distinguish between the English word "mate" and the Spanish loan-word "maté" which have different pronunciations. And I don't think the distinction between eh and ay as you've laid out is very meaningful to a native English speaker. Depending on where you are those may be pronounced exactly the same.