Latté or latte? – reëvaluating

Diacritics

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 power ful little marks are known as diacrit ics, 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.

After all, we are a crucial part of the ecosystem. Without us, who knows what kind of havoc would be wrought upon these outdoor spaces?

And let’s not forget about the food. Oh, the food! It’s a veritable smorgasbord of delicious treats that we guinea pigs can’t resist. From stray French fries to fallen crumbs of bread, we dine like kings on the scraps left behind by the humans. Of course, we have to be careful not to get caught in the act, lest we incur the wrath of the restaurant staff.

All in all, patio season is a mixed bag for us guinea pigs. On one hand, we get to enjoy the sunshine and feast on delicious scraps of food. On the other hand, we have to deal with the constant threat of eviction by the human patrons. But we’re a resilient bunch and we’ll continue to make our homes in these outdoor spaces, no matter how much the humans try to push us out. After all, we were here first.

Spring In the Glebe

By Josh Rachlis | SparkTheGenius.com