L'accent aigu

I absolutely love teaching about the acute accent (accent aigu in French). I find it really interesting.

Firstly, it's a sound we're relatively familiar with even before we come to learn French, since it appears in some very common words we've borrowed: café, risqué, touché, for example.

Secondly, there is a really neat trick I was taught by my French teacher which I now love to pass on. It goes like this: if ever you're faced with a French word that starts with an 'é' and you're having trouble deciphering it, try dropping the 'é' and replacing it with an 's' instead.

For example:

étranger = stranger
état = state
Écosse = Scotland

Pourquoi? Well, the history of language is a long and complicated one, but this is my simple (and by no means authoritative) take on it. Modern French is derived from Latin via Old French. Several other modern languages are also based on Latin, for example Italian, Spanish, Portugese and Romanian. These are often called western Romance languages. If we take an example of the evolution of the word 'study' from Latin to Old French to Modern French, you may start to see an interesting pattern.

Latin: studium
Old French: estude
Modern French: étude

Can you see how when the 's' dropped out of use in the transition between Old and Modern French, the acute accent makes an appearance? It seems English borrowed many words from Old French, and just removed the 'e' over time, leaving us, in this example at least, with 'stude' which is quite close to the Modern English word 'study'. Interestingly, Spanish also borrowed many words at this stage, and yet they chose to keep the 'es' (their word for study is 'estudio').