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Permalink Reply by Frank on September 1, 2009 at 9:53pm

Hello Shagun,

And welcome to the forum.

Accents in an integral part of the spelling. You can imagine "e", "è", "ê" and "é" as totally different characters. They also influence the pronunciation.

Unfortunately, I don't think there is any rule (even a rule of thumb) in order to guess if an accent should be "grave" or "aigu". You have to learn how words are spelled, and that includes accents.

Using a spell checker while writing text can help a lot in order to memorize how words are spelled. A French spell checker will immediately underline a word if you forgot an accent or used the wrong one.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on September 2, 2009 at 6:20am

I think it's possible to come up with one or two rules of thumb, but it depends a bit on which way round you want to see things. If you know the pronunciation of a word and want to predict the spelling, then a rule of thumb would be:
- if the sound is a close [e] sound, then the spelling is probably é, except if it's an ending -er, -ez, -et etc;
- if the sound is an open [E] sound, then the spelling is probably è; it could be ê but this is comparatively rare and it's easier to just learn these cases individually;
- neither accent tends to be used before ss, sc and other double consonants (though you'll find exceptions, such as with the prefix pré, which keeps its accent in words like préscolaire).

The problem for most learners is they'll tend not to know the pronunciation in the first place; in that case, you do sort of have to just learn which accent to use. One rule of thumb that might be useful is that the [e] vowel essentially never occurs in a closed syllable (i.e. never occurs in a syllable ending in a consonant). So for example, you know that frère is frère because frére would actually be an impossible word of French. (And for Verlan speakers: this is why e.g. chier, with an [e] vowel, becomes ièche with an [E] vowel, when the syllable is re-ordered.)

Another source of exceptions are the traditional spellings of words like événement, nowadays spelt évènement by many speakers). These occur because e.g. événement used to be pronounced é-vé-ne-ment but now tends to be pronounced as three syllables é-vène-ment-- note how the second vowel is now in a closed syllable, so can't be pronounced [e].

Note that there's actually variation among speakers of the pronunciation of these two vowels ([e] and [E]). For example in words like presser, descendre, the pronunciation of the first "e" could be [e] or [E] depending on the speaker (and sometimes register).

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Permalink Reply by Frank on September 2, 2009 at 10:15am

Out of a list of 336,531 French words (from Project Gutenberg), I just counted out how many had a "é", how many had a "è", and how many had a "ê". The result is interesting:

é:104,668
è: 10,707
ê: 2,279

So out of all words featuring an accentuated "e":
89% of them use a é, and only 9% use a è.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on September 2, 2009 at 6:11pm

That's interesting-- I think it has to do with the distribution of the [e] and [E] vowels in French. As I mentioned, [e] can't occur in closed syllables; conversely, [E] TENDS to occur in closed syllables, but [e] in open ones (even in cases like près, speakers actually tend to pronounce it as pré). And on the whole, French "prefers" open syllables (actually, this is a universal tendency in languages to some extent). So statistically, [e] will be more common and hence, è more common than é in the spelling.

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Permalink Reply by Pamela Kingfisher on September 2, 2009 at 7:22pm

"è more common than é in the spelling."
Neil don't you mean the other way around?
Pam

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Permalink Reply by shagun on September 4, 2009 at 5:45pm

merci beacoup ........ to all of u ur all really a gr8 helping hand... there r many many problems related to french plz keep on helping me thx .......

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