Strange marks in foreign languages

Diacritics

When I first study a new foreign language, I admit to ignoring the various written marks above and below letters.   Although I am not proud of that fact, it is human nature to pay attention to what seems to be most important at the moment, and the sounds, structures and words of a language consume my thinking.  After the initial rush of becoming acquainted with a language, however, details start to stand out, and I wonder which language clues I may be missing.  Diacritics are one of those important clues.

Written marks added to letters are technically called diacritics.  We often refer to the more common ones as accent marks.  The diacritics that I find most often in Romance languages are the acute accent (é), the grave accent (è), the circumflex (ê), the tilde  (ã), the trema (ë), and the cedilla (ç).  I  took a look at the four Romance languages that I study (French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish) to see how certain diacritics may help me in acquiring those languages.

In French, I found that the acute accent and the grave accent are guides to the correct pronunciation of the e.    The (é) with the acute accent is an "ay" sound. The  (è) with a grave makes a sound, like "ehh."  Also, the (ç) lets you know when to use a soft s sound rather than a hard k sound, as in the word français.

In Italian, I learned that some accents are obligatory and others are optional!  What a slippery path for the beginning language learner!  The most useful accent I found was the one used to tell the difference between two words with identical spelling but different meaning.  Dì  means "day," but di means "of," ; è is a verb, but e is a conjunction.

For the Portuguese language, the acute and circumflex accents indicate not only stress on the syllable for all vowels,  but also the open or closed quality of the vowels a, e and o. Á, É and Ó  are open vowels. Â, Ê. and Ô are closed vowels. Open vowels are produced with the mouth open wider, as the name implies.

The tilde ((ã) is placed only on vowels in Portuguese and gives them a nasal quality, with the air going out through the nose.  One other diacritic, the cedilla, is used as in French to give the "c" a soft pronunciation.

Finally, Spanish language diacritics are fairly straightforward.  If you see an acute accent ((é) on a word, stress that syllable.  And sometimes the acute accent will help you distinguish between two words that have the same sound but different meaning.  For example, Sí means "Yes," but Si means "If." Spanish uses the tilde (the wavy line) to pronounce the "n" as "ny,"  as in the powerful weather system, El Niño .

We did not do an exhaustive study of Romance language diacritics in this post; otherwise both you and I would be exhausted.  But I think by looking at the diacritical highlights in each language, we have made a beginning.  Now we can at least notice those "strange marks" in other languages and use them in our quest for language acquisition.