It's Not (Dia)Critical

Those of you who know some French may realize that I haven't been placing the accent marks in my words, thereby making cafe look like it would rhyme with the English word "safe".  My hula brother Daniel (hula brother: that is, a man who has danced by my side in my weekly hula class for 5 years, but rarely right in front of me, because he's well over 6' tall) is, it turns out, a real polyglot after my own heart.  He not only speaks French, but has also studied such wildly practical languages as Yiddish and Hawaiian (the language next on my list...).  He wrote a facebook entry recently that put me to shame, not only using accents where they belonged, but even introducing other alphabets altogether (i.e. Hebrew alphabet for Yiddish). 

And so, chastened to the core, I have figure out, sort of, how to put in accent marks.  As Anthony will attest, I usually find the most complicated way to do things on the computer, so how I'm going to do this from now on is open a Word document, go to insert symbols and choose my letter/accent combos, cut them from Word and paste them into the blog.  If you know of a better way to do this, by all means let me know!

You've probably understood me just fine up till now.  So no, I do not intend to go back and correct my previous blog entries -- unless I get really, really bored one day.  You'll just have to live with words like francais, ecole, and tres up to this current post.  But from now on, any words missing their diactrical marks are either a) mistakes or b) sheer laziness.  You may mock me for both. 

From Wikipedia:

A diacritic ( /daɪ.əˈkrɪtɨk/; also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign) is an ancillary glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός (diakritikós, "distinguishing"). Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute ( ´ ) and grave ( ` ) are often called accents. Diacritical marks may appear above or below a letter, or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters.

The main use of diacritics in the Latin alphabet is to change the sound value of the letter to which they are added. Examples from English are the diaeresis in naïve and Noël, which show that the vowel with the diaeresis mark is pronounced separately from the preceding vowel; the acute and grave accents, which indicate that a final vowel is to be pronounced, as in saké and poetic breathèd, and the cedilla under the "c" in the borrowed French word façade, which shows it is pronounced /s/ rather than /k/. In other Latin alphabets, they may distinguish between homonyms, such as French là "there" versus la "the," which are both pronounced [la].