By the way, diacritic is my word of the week, fighting off tough competition from glyph. And as I said, we don't use many in written English, unlike our continental cousins in France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Sweden with their acutes, angstroms, breves, cedillas, circumflexes, diaereses (aka umlauts), graves, macrons and tildes.
In fact, I could only find use of one diacritic in native English. That's the diaeresis, two dots above a letter where there's a double vowel, as in c oöperative, daïs, naïve or reëlect, to make sure that both vowels are sounded independently, and even that is dying a rapid death in favour of the helpful hyphen (co-operative, re-elect) or of nothing at all (dais, naive). How to pronounce those last two without diacritic direction?
The majority of words in common English usage employing accents have all been imported from our afore-mentioned neighbours. These are sometimes termed 'loan' words. And even then, it seems to have been a matter of chance whether the accents they came with have survived the incorporation or not, with culinary words putting up the greatest resistance to having their diacritics lopped off.
Let me illustrate. We still write blasé, café, cliché, exposé, façade, fête, frappé, latté, piñata, résumé, rosé, soufflé, soupçon, über and Zoë - mostly with but admittedly sometimes without their accents - but a word like hotel (originally hôtel from the French) ditched its circumflex long ago, just like cote and rote have done; and when we inducted cañón (from the Spanish) we turned it into canyon. The prognosis for accents on words in English usage appears to be changing from acute to grave.😯
I didn't know whether I could follow that brief essay on accent and pronunciation with a poem of any substance, but as I didn't write one for last week's blog, I felt duty-bound to give it a go today. It's a sonnet of sorts and an exercise in diacritics. You'll decide if it's any good or not.
I clearly stated we were being naïve
to take his résumé at face value.
You felt it looked too clichéd to be true
but wouldn't back me up with Geneviève.
He was an émigré from some régime
for God's sake. How ingénue could she be?
She seemed blasé, her mind made up, so we
had no choice. This über would lead our team.
It wasn't too long before the soufflé
went splat. Coöperation is the rule
we live by - not a soupçon from the fool
fêted by our boss. Children died that day.
They were taking refuge in the café.
Too cool in his rôle, trigger-happy tool.
