#stonefruit
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Our volunteers look into many questions every day; sometimes it takes them a little while to answer.
Make it descriptive, including relevant context, but also to the point. This way you improve your chances of getting a more relevant and specific answer.
I'm failing to find any example of words that are written with accented letters which are in turn not pronounced, so I suppose you can go with that
Be aware however that accents do not necessarily change pronunciation. In France French, the circumflex accent almost never does, but it does change the meaning (e.g. mur (wall) / mûr (ripe))
Note that this only happens with E as other vowels don’t get reduced. Anyway, an unaccented E represents a schwa in most cases: it’s the first sound you make when you say ‘about’ in English. When that happens, this E can be skipped over. For example, the three-syllable verb « acheter (a-she-té) » is often pronounced with two syllables as (ash-té).
Read this to learn more:
https://www.lawlessfrench.com/pronunciation/e-instable/
The letter e is often potentially silent, a characteristic with 3 French names: e caduc, e instable (the most accurate), and e muet (the most common).
In any case, you’re right in saying that an accented E is always pronounced. Our concern is with unaccented E because reductions (almost) always happen with unaccented E, but not all unaccented Es can be reduced. It’s detailed more in the link I gave.
Thanks for taking your time to answer my question! It just showed me that french is more complicated than I thought heh. I'll read the article, it seems like it's gonna help me a lot.
For other letters than E, accents serve a different purpose
The circonflexe ^ is either just to show there used to be an s (which you can generally find in English, like forêt = forest) or to make a distinction like they said in mur vs mûr
And the tréma ï is used to show it's pronounced separately from vowels next to it
Bc ai for example is pronounced è so when you read aïe you know it's pronounced ay
Technically there is aiguë where the ë is not pronounced. That's the only case though that I know of
It still affects pronunciation tho
Reason 224 to accept the 1990 reforms
Yuckie
Yippee
The circonflexe can affect pronunciation especially in certain accents for e, a and o
I don't think it affects i or u though
It doesn’t, no, which was why 1990 removed circumflexes on I and U, keeping the latter in specific contexts like « du » vs « dû »