One Big Happy by Rick Detorie for January 03, 2018

Ruthay?

They were my own personal nightmares. We have three accents in French. é, è, ê. I never knew which was which. Still have difficulties.

The accent on the ‘e’ does not change the sound of the ‘e’, it shows you that you pronounce that syllable stronger than the other one. So it is Ho-ZAY instead of HO-zay. Spanish vowels are pronounced differently than in English, but nothing to do with the accents.

In German they have Umlauts

Mom is getting accents in Spanish confused with accents in French. Spanish has only one kind of accent mark, and it shows that the syllable with the accent mark on the vowel is the stressed syllable. (It also, with few exceptions, shows that the word is irregular as to which syllable is stressed.)

There is the circumflex and tilde.

I don’t want an accent over my name. Otherwise I’ll become overstressed…

Had a lot of this when I was a clerk in a high school — everyone started adding apostrophes to their names. Problem was our antiquated database didn’t take ’em and the kids were mad when their name was “misspellled.”

Oh that would definitely work for Rose! Excuse me while I get a glass.

Be careful Ruthie, not all accents help.