| Kenneth G. Wilson (1923–). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993. |
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| ACCENT 2, ACCENT MARK (nn.) |
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English sometimes retains accent marks in words borrowed from languages that regularly employ them in writing but sometimes drops them, particularly in words felt to have become fully naturalized by long or heavy use. British English typically retains more accent marks than does American English. For example, British English generally retains both French acute accents in résumé, but American English now has in divided usage resume and résumé, which means that sometimes context must prevent confusion between the noun and the verb resume. Note that in indicating pronunciation American English sometimes uses a symbol very similar to the acute accent (´) to indicate a syllable more heavily stressed than those around it, as in décanal and decánal. Other accent marks sometimes encountered in printed or written English are the French grave (vis-à-vis) and circumflex (tête-à-tête) accents; the German umlaut (as in Köln—pronounced a bit like KULN—for Cologne) and the dieresis (which indicates two syllables where contiguous vowels might mistakenly be read as a single syllable, e.g., naïve and coöperate for naive and cooperate), both of which use the same symbol in English writing and printing; the cedilla used by French, Spanish, and Portuguese (garçon, curaçao) to make a medial letter -c- sound like an s; the Spanish tilde (cañon, señor), which indicates that a y sound should follow a nasal; and the ha ek, which occurs mainly in Czech names and words (haek, pronounced HAH-CHEK). See also ACUTE ACCENT; BREVE; CEDILLA; DIACRITICS; GRAVE ACCENT; HACEK; MACRON. | 1 |
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| | | The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. Copyright © 1993 Columbia University Press. |
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