The
circumflex
The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from la, circumflexus "bent around"a ...
(ˆ) is one of the five
diacritic
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...
s used in
French orthography. It may appear on the vowels
a,
e,
i,
o, and
u, for example â in ''pâté''.
The circumflex, called ''accent circonflexe'', has three primary functions in French:
* It affects the pronunciation of ''a'', ''e'', and ''o.'' Although it is used on i and u as well, it does not affect their pronunciation.
* It often indicates the historical presence of a letter, commonly ''s,'' that has become silent and fallen away in
orthography
An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.
Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and mos ...
over the course of linguistic evolution.
* It is used, less frequently, to distinguish between two
homophone
A homophone () is a word that is pronounced the same (to varying extent) as another word but differs in meaning. A ''homophone'' may also differ in spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, for example ''rose'' (flower) and ''rose'' (p ...
s. For example, ''sur'' ('on/about') versus ''sûr'' '(sure/safe'), and ''du'' ('of the') versus ''dû'' ('had to')
And in certain words, it is simply an orthographic convention.
First usages
The circumflex first appeared in written French in the 16th century. It was borrowed from
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic peri ...
, and combines the
acute accent
The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed ch ...
and the
grave accent
The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian and many other western European languages, as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other languages using t ...
. Grammarian
Jacques Dubois
Jacques Dubois ( Latinised as Jacobus Sylvius; 1478 – 14 January 1555) was a French anatomist. Dubois was the first to describe venous valves, although their function was later discovered by William Harvey. He was the brother of Franciscus Sy ...
(known as Sylvius) is the first writer known to have used the Greek symbol in his writing (although he wrote in
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
).
Several grammarians of the French
Renaissance
The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass ideas ...
attempted to prescribe a precise usage for the diacritic in their treatises on language. The modern usage of the circumflex accent became standardized in the 18th or 19th century.
Jacques Dubois (Sylvius)
Sylvius used the circumflex to indicate so-called "false
diphthongs". Early modern French as spoken in Sylvius' time had
coalesced all its true diphthongs into phonetic
monophthongs; that is, a pure vowel sound, one whose articulation at both beginning and end is relatively fixed, and which does not glide up or down towards a new position of articulation. He justifies its usage in his work ''Iacobii Sylvii Ambiani In Linguam Gallicam Isagoge una, cum eiusdem Grammatica Latinogallica ex Hebraeis Graecis et Latinus authoribus'' (''An Introduction to the Gallic (French) Language, And Its Grammar With Regard to Hebrew, Latin and Greek Authors'') published by
Robert Estienne in 1531. A kind of grammatical survey of French written in Latin, the book relies heavily on the comparison of ancient languages to his contemporary French and explained the specifics of his language. At that time, all
linguistic treatises used classical Latin and Greek as their models. Sylvius presents the circumflex in his list of typographic conventions, stating:
Sylvius was quite aware that the circumflex was purely a graphical convention. He showed that these diphthongs, even at that time, had been reduced to monophthongs, and used the circumflex to "join" the two letters that had historically been diphthongs into one
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
. When two adjacent vowels were to be pronounced independently, Sylvius proposed using the
diaeresis, called the ''tréma'' in French. Sylvius gives the example
( for ''je trais'') as opposed to
( for ''je trahis''). Even these groups, however, did not represent true diphthongs (such as the English ''try'' ), but rather adjacent vowels pronounced separately without an intervening
consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced wit ...
. As French no longer had any true diphthongs, the diaeresis alone would have sufficed to distinguish between ambiguous vowel pairs. His circumflex was entirely unnecessary. As such the ''tréma'' became standardized in French orthography, and Sylvius' circumflex usage never caught on. But the grammarian had pointed out an important orthographical problem of the time.
At that time, the combination ''eu'' indicated two different pronunciations:
* as in ''sûr'' and ''mûr'', written ''seur'', ''meur'' (or as
and
in Sylvius' work), or
* as in ''cœur'' and ''sœur'', written by Sylvius not only with a circumflex, but a circumflex topped with a
macron:
and
(Sylvius used ' to denote a hard ''c'' before ''e'' and ''i'').
Sylvius' proposals were never adopted ''per se'', but he opened the door for discussion among French grammarians to improve and disambiguate French orthography.
Étienne Dolet
Étienne Dolet
Étienne Dolet (; 3 August 15093 August 1546) was a French scholar, translator and printer. Dolet was a controversial figure throughout his lifetime. His early attacks upon the Inquisition, the city council and other authorities in Toulouse, tog ...
, in his ''Maniere de bien traduire d'une langue en aultre : d'aduantage de la punctuation de la langue Francoyse, plus des accents d'ycelle'' (1540), uses the circumflex (this time as a punctuation mark written between two letters) to show three
metaplasms:
* 1.
Syncope, or the disappearance of an interior syllable, shown by Dolet as: ''laiˆrra'', ''paiˆra'', ''uraiˆment'' (''vraiˆment''), ''donˆra'' for ''laiſſera'' (''laissera''), ''paiera'', ''uraiemẽt'' (''vraiment''), ''donnera''. It is worthy of note that before the 14th century, the so-called "mute ''e''" was always pronounced in French as a
schwa
In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa (, rarely or ; sometimes spelled shwa) is a vowel sound denoted by the IPA symbol , placed in the central position of the vowel chart. In English and some other languages, it rep ...
(), regardless of position. For example, ''paiera'' was pronounced instead of the modern . In the 14th century, however, this unaccented ''e'' began to disappear in
hiatus
Hiatus may refer to:
*Hiatus (anatomy), a natural fissure in a structure
*Hiatus (stratigraphy), a discontinuity in the age of strata in stratigraphy
*''Hiatus'', a genus of picture-winged flies with sole member species ''Hiatus fulvipes''
*Globa ...
and lose its phonemic status, although it remained in orthography. Some of the syncopes Dolet cites, however, had the mute ''e'' reintroduced later: his ''laiˆrra'' is now or , and ''donˆra'' is today or .
* 2.
Haplology
Haplology (from Ancient Greek, Greek "simple" and , "speech") is, in spoken language, the elision (elimination or deletion) of an entire syllable through dissimilation (a differentiating shift that affects two neighboring similar sounds). The ...
(the reduction of sequences of identical or similar phonemes): Dolet cites forms which no longer exist: ''auˆous'' (''avˆous''), ''nˆauous'' (''nˆavous'') for ''auez uous'' (''avez-vous'') and ''n'auez uous'' (''n'avez-vous'').
* 3.
Contraction
Contraction may refer to:
Linguistics
* Contraction (grammar), a shortened word
* Poetic contraction, omission of letters for poetic reasons
* Elision, omission of sounds
** Syncope (phonology), omission of sounds in a word
* Synalepha, merged ...
of an ''é'' followed by a mute ''e'' in the feminine plural (pronounced as two syllables in poetry), realized as a long close mid-vowel . It is important to remember that mute "e" at the end of a word was pronounced as a schwa until the 17th century. Thus ''penseˆes'' , ''ſuborneˆes'' (''suborneˆes'') for ''pensées'' , ''subornées''. Dolet specifies that the acute accent should be written in noting the contraction. This contraction of two like vowels into one long vowel is also seen in other words, such as ''aˆage'' for ''aage'' (''âge'').
Thus Dolet uses the circumflex to indicate lost or silent phonemes, one of the uses for which the diacritic is still used today. Although not all his suggested usages were adopted, his work has allowed insight into the historical
phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...
of French. Dolet summarized his own contributions with these words: ''"Ce ſont les preceptions" ', "que tu garderas quant aux accents de la langue Francoyse. Leſquels auſsi obſerueront tous diligents Imprimeurs : car telles choſes enrichiſſent fort l'impreſsion, & demõſtrent" ', "que ne faiſons rien par ignorance.''" Translation: ''"It is these precepts that you should follow concerning the accents of the French language. All diligent printers should also observe these rules, because such things greatly enrich printing and demonstrate that nothing is left to chance."''
Indication of a lost phoneme
In many cases, the circumflex indicates the historical presence of a phoneme which over the course of linguistic evolution became silent, and then disappeared altogether from the orthography.
Disappearance of "s"
The most common phenomenon involving the circumflex relates to before a consonant. Around the time of the
Battle of Hastings
The Battle of Hastings nrf, Batâle dé Hastings was fought on 14 October 1066 between the Norman-French army of William the Conqueror, William, the Duke of Normandy, and an English army under the Anglo-Saxons, Anglo-Saxon King Harold Godw ...
in 1066, such post-vocalic sounds had begun to disappear before hard consonants in many words, being replaced by a compensatory elongation of the preceding vowel, which was maintained into the 18th century.
The silent remained orthographically for some time, and various attempts were made to distinguish the historical presence graphically, but without much success. Notably, 17th century playwright
Pierre Corneille
Pierre Corneille (; 6 June 1606 – 1 October 1684) was a French tragedian. He is generally considered one of the three great seventeenth-century French dramatists, along with Molière and Racine.
As a young man, he earned the valuable patronag ...
, in printed editions of his plays, used the "
long s
The long s , also known as the medial s or initial s, is an archaism, archaic form of the lowercase letter . It replaced the single ''s'', or one or both of the letters ''s'' in a 'double ''s sequence (e.g., "ſinfulneſs" for "sinfulness" ...
" (ſ) to indicate silent "s" and the traditional form for the sound when pronounced (''tempeſte'', ''haſte'', ''teſte'' vs. ''peste'', ''funeste'', ''chaste'').
The circumflex was officially introduced into the 1740 edition of the dictionary of the
Académie Française
An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary education, secondary or tertiary education, tertiary higher education, higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membershi ...
. In more recently introduced
neologism
A neologism Greek νέο- ''néo''(="new") and λόγος /''lógos'' meaning "speech, utterance"] is a relatively recent or isolated term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use, but that has not been fully accepted int ...
s, however, the French
lexicon
A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Koine Greek language, Greek word (), neuter of () ...
was enriched with Latin-based words which retained their both in pronunciation and orthography, although the historically evolved word may have let the drop in favor of a circumflex. Thus, many learned words, or words added to the French vocabulary since then often keep both the pronunciation and the presence of the from Latin. For example:
* ''feste'' (first appearing in 1080) → ''fête'', but:
** ''festin'': borrowed in the 16th century from the Italian ''festino'',
** ''festivité'': borrowed from the Latin ''festivitas'' in the 19th century, and
** ''festival'': borrowed from the English ''festival'' in the 19th century have all retained their , both written and pronounced. Likewise the related pairs ''tête''/''test'', ''fenêtre''/''défenestrer'', ''bête''/''bestiaire'', etc.
More examples of a disappearing 's' that has been marked with an accent circumflex can be seen in the words below:
* ''ancêtre'' "
ancestor
An ancestor, also known as a forefather, fore-elder or a forebear, is a parent or (recursively) the parent of an antecedent (i.e., a grandparent, great-grandparent, great-great-grandparent and so forth). ''Ancestor'' is "any person from whom ...
"
* ''hôpital'' "
hospital
A hospital is a health care institution providing patient treatment with specialized health science and auxiliary healthcare staff and medical equipment. The best-known type of hospital is the general hospital, which typically has an emerge ...
"
* ''
hôtel'' "
hostel
A hostel is a form of low-cost, short-term shared sociable lodging where guests can rent a bed, usually a bunk bed in a dormitory, with shared use of a lounge and sometimes a kitchen. Rooms can be mixed or single-sex and have private or shared b ...
"
* ''forêt'' "
forest
A forest is an area of land dominated by trees. Hundreds of definitions of forest are used throughout the world, incorporating factors such as tree density, tree height, land use, legal standing, and ecological function. The United Nations' ...
"
* coût "cost"
* ''rôtir'' "to roast"
* ''tâche'' "task"
* ''côte'' "
coast
The coast, also known as the coastline or seashore, is defined as the area where land meets the ocean, or as a line that forms the boundary between the land and the coastline. The Earth has around of coastline. Coasts are important zones in n ...
"
* ''
pâté'' "paste"
* ''août'' "
August
August is the eighth month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendars, and the fifth of seven months to have a length of 31 days. Its zodiac sign is Leo and was originally named ''Sextilis'' in Latin because it was the 6th month in ...
"
* ''
château
A château (; plural: châteaux) is a manor house or residence of the lord of the manor, or a fine country house of nobility or gentry, with or without fortifications, originally, and still most frequently, in French-speaking regions.
Nowaday ...
'' "
castle
A castle is a type of fortified structure built during the Middle Ages predominantly by the nobility or royalty and by military orders. Scholars debate the scope of the word ''castle'', but usually consider it to be the private fortified r ...
"
* ''degoûtant'' "disgusting"
* ''fantôme'' "
ghost
A ghost is the soul or spirit of a dead person or animal that is believed to be able to appear to the living. In ghostlore, descriptions of ghosts vary widely from an invisible presence to translucent or barely visible wispy shapes, to rea ...
, phantom" (from Latin ''phantasma'')
* ''île'' "
isle"
* ''conquête'' "
conquest
Conquest is the act of military subjugation of an enemy by force of arms.
Military history provides many examples of conquest: the Roman conquest of Britain, the Mauryan conquest of Afghanistan and of vast areas of the Indian subcontinent, t ...
"
* ''tempête'' "
tempest"
* ''bâtard'' "bastard"
* ''bête'' "beast"
* ''Pâques'' "
Pascha" (old name for Easter, from Latin ''pasca'')
* ''Pentecôte'' "
Pentecost
Pentecost (also called Whit Sunday, Whitsunday or Whitsun) is a Christianity, Christian holiday which takes place on the 50th day (the seventh Sunday) after Easter Sunday. It commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles in the Ne ...
"
Here are some instances where French has lost an S but other Romance Languages haven't:
* être - to be (Estar in Spanish)
* connaître - to know (Conoscere in Italian)
* tempête - storm (Tempesta in Italian)
* tête - head (Testa in Italian)
* goût - taste (Gustus in Latin)
* naître - to be born (Nascer in Portuguese)
Disappearance of other letters
The circumflex also serves as a vestige of other lost letters, particularly letters in
hiatus
Hiatus may refer to:
*Hiatus (anatomy), a natural fissure in a structure
*Hiatus (stratigraphy), a discontinuity in the age of strata in stratigraphy
*''Hiatus'', a genus of picture-winged flies with sole member species ''Hiatus fulvipes''
*Globa ...
where two vowels have contracted into one phoneme, such as ''aage'' → ''âge''; ''baailler'' → ''bâiller'', etc.
Likewise, the former medieval diphthong "eu" when pronounced would often, in the 18th century, take a circumflex in order to distinguish
homophones, such as ''deu'' → ''dû'' (from ''devoir'' vs. ''du'' = ''de'' + ''le''); ''creu'' → ''crû'' (from ''croître'' vs. ''cru'' from ''croire'') ; ''seur'' → ''sûr'' (the adjective vs. the preposition ''sur''), etc.
* ''cruement'' → ''crûment'';
* ''meur'' → ''mûr''.
Indication of Greek omega
In words derived from
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic peri ...
, the circumflex over ''o'' often indicates the presence of the Greek letter omega (ω) when the word is pronounced with the sound : ''diplôme'' (δίπλωμα), ''cône'' (κῶνος). Where Greek omega does not correspond to in French, the circumflex is not used: ''comédie'' (κωμῳδία).
This rule is sporadic, because many such words are written without the circumflex; for instance, ''axiome'' and ''zone'' have unaccented vowels despite their etymology (Greek ἀξίωμα and ζώνη) and pronunciation (, ). On the other hand, many learned words ending in ''-ole'', ''-ome'', and ''-one'' (but not tracing back to a Greek omega) acquired a circumflex accent and the closed pronunciation by analogy with words like ''cône'' and ''diplôme'': ''trône'' (θρόνος), ''pôle'' (πόλος), ''binôme'' (from Latin ''binomium'').
The circumflex accent was also used to indicate French vowels deriving from Greek eta (η), but this practice has not always survived in modern orthography. For example, the spelling ''théorême'' (θεώρημα) was later replaced by ''théorème'', while the Greek letter is still spelled ''bêta''.
Analogical and idiopathic cases
Some circumflexes appear for no known reason. It is thought to give words an air of prestige, like a crown (thus ''suprême'' and ''voûte'').
Linguistic interference sometimes accounts for the presence of a circumflex. This is the case in the
first person First person or first-person may refer to:
* First person (ethnic), indigenous peoples, usually used in the plural
* First person, a grammatical person
* First person, a gender-neutral, marital-neutral term for titles such as first lady and first ...
plural
The plural (sometimes abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the default quantity represented by that noun. This de ...
of the
preterite
The preterite or preterit (; abbreviated or ) is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past; in some languages, such as Spanish, French, and English, it is equivalent to the simple pas ...
indicative (or ''passé simple''), which adds a circumflex by association with the
second person plural, thus:
* Latin ''cantāvistis'' → ''cantāstis'' →
OF ''chantastes'' → ''chantâtes'' (after the muting of the interposing )
* Latin ''cantāvimus'' → ''cantāmus'' → OF ''chantames'' → ''chantâmes'' (by interference with ''chantâtes'').
All instances of the first and second persons plural of the preterite take the circumflex in the
conjugation
Conjugation or conjugate may refer to:
Linguistics
* Grammatical conjugation, the modification of a verb from its basic form
* Emotive conjugation or Russell's conjugation, the use of loaded language
Mathematics
* Complex conjugation, the chang ...
ending except the verb ''haïr'', due to its necessary dieresis (''nous haïmes'', ''vous haïtes'').
Vowel length and quality
In general, vowels bearing the circumflex accent were historically long (for example, through
compensatory lengthening
Compensatory lengthening in phonology and historical linguistics is the lengthening of a vowel sound that happens upon the loss of a following consonant, usually in the syllable coda, or of a vowel in an adjacent syllable. Lengthening triggered ...
associated with the consonant loss described above). Vowel length is no longer distinctive in most varieties of modern French, but some of the older length distinctions now correspond to differences in vowel quality, and the circumflex can be used to indicate these differences orthographically.
* ''â'' → ("velar" or
back ''a'') — ''pâte'' vs. ''patte'', ''tâche'' vs. ''tache''
* ''ê'' → (open ''e''; equivalent of ''è'' or ''e'' followed by two consonants) — ''prêt'' vs. ''pré''
* ''ô'' → (equivalent to ''au'' or ''o'' at the end of a syllable) — ''hôte'' vs. ''hotte'', ''côte'' vs. ''cote''
The circumflex does not affect the pronunciation of the letters "i" or "u" (except in the combination "eû": ''jeûne'' vs. ''jeune'' ).
The diacritic disappears in related words if the pronunciation changes (particularly when the vowel in question is no longer in the stressed final syllable). For example:
* ''infâme'' , but ''infamie'' ,
* ''grâce'' , but ''gracieux'' ,
* ''fantôme'' , but ''fantomatique'' .
In other cases, the presence or absence of the circumflex in derived words is not correlated with pronunciation, for example with the vowel "u":
* ''fût'' vs. ''futaille''
* ''bûche'' vs. ''bûchette''
* ''sûr'' and ''sûrement'' , but ''assurer'' .
There are nonetheless notable exceptions to the pronunciation rules given here. For instance, in non-final syllables, "ê" can be realized as a closed as a result of
vowel harmony
In phonology, vowel harmony is an Assimilation (linguistics), assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is t ...
: compare ''bête'' and ''bêta'' with ''bêtise'' and ''abêtir'' , or ''tête'' and ''têtard'' vs. ''têtu'' .
In varieties of French where open/closed syllable adjustment (''loi de position'') applies, the presence of a circumflex accent is not taken into account in the mid vowel alternations ~ and ~. This is the case in southern Metropolitan French, where for example ''dôme'' is pronounced as opposed to (as indicated by the orthography, and as pronounced in northern Metropolitan varieties).
The merger of and is widespread in Parisian and Belgian French, resulting for example in the realization of the word ''âme'' as instead of .
Distinguishing homographs
Although normally the
grave accent
The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian and many other western European languages, as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other languages using t ...
serves the purpose of differentiating homographs in French (''là ~ la, où ~ ou, çà ~ ça, à ~ a, etc.''), the circumflex, for historical reasons, has come to serve a similar role. In fact, almost all the cases where the circumflex is used to distinguish homographs can be explained by the reasons above: it would therefore be false to declare that it is in certain words a sign placed solely to distinguish homographs, as with the grave accent. However, it does allow one to remove certain ambiguities. For example, in words that underwent the change of "eu" to "û", the circumflex avoids possible homography with other words containing "u":
* ''sur'' ~ ''sûr(e)(s)'' (from ''seür'' → ''sëur''): The homography with the adjective ''sur(e)'', "sour", justifies maintaining the accent in the feminine and plural. The accent is also maintained in derived words such as ''sûreté''.
* ''du'' ~ ''dû'' (from ''deü''): As the homography disappears in the
inflected
In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and defini ...
forms of the
past participle
In linguistics, a participle () (from Latin ' a "sharing, partaking") is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from ...
, we have ''dû'' but ''dus'' / ''due(s)''.
* ''mur'' ~ ''mûr(e)(s)'' (from ''meür''): The accent is maintained in all forms as well as in derived words (''mûrir'', ''mûrissement'').
Orthographic reform
Francophone
French became an international language in the Middle Ages, when the power of the Kingdom of France made it the second international language, alongside Latin. This status continued to grow into the 18th century, by which time French was the l ...
experts, aware of the difficulties and inconsistencies of the circumflex, proposed in 1990 a simplified orthography abolishing the circumflex over the letters ''u'' and ''i'' except in cases where its absence would create ambiguities and homographs. These recommendations, although published in the ''
Journal officiel de la République française
A journal, from the Old French ''journal'' (meaning "daily"), may refer to:
*Bullet journal, a method of personal organization
*Diary, a record of what happened over the course of a day or other period
*Daybook, also known as a general journal, a ...
'', were immediately and widely criticized, and were adopted only slowly. Nevertheless, they were upheld by the
Académie française
An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary education, secondary or tertiary education, tertiary higher education, higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membershi ...
,
Site d'information sur la nouvelle orthographe française
/ref> which upgraded them from optional to standard and for use in schoolbooks in 2016.
See also
* Diacritic
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...
* Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...
* Reforms of French orthography
French orthography was already (more or less) fixed and (from a phonological point of view) outdated when its lexicography developed in the late 17th century and the Académie française was mandated to establish an "official" prescriptive norm ...
Notes
References
:''This article draws heavily on the Accent circonflexe article in the French-language Wikipedia (access date February 18, 2006).
Bibliography
*
*
*
*
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Circumflex In French
Latin-script diacritics
French language