Monday, April 18, 2011

再談法文的變音符號

我英語構詞法這門課的重頭戲之一,就是介紹英語裡的借詞,特別是拉丁文、法文、和義大利文。對於大多數的同學而言,源自法文的詞彙尤難掌握,因為除了發音和拼字讓人捉摸不定之外,還有令人聞之暈頭、望之卻步的變音符號:左下撇 (acute accent)、右下撇 (grave accent)、尖帽子 (circumflex)、上兩點 (dieresis)、掛尾巴 (cedilla)。

事實上,隨著外來語英語化 (anglicization) 的逐漸深入,變音符號也由原先的一定要有,過渡到可有可無,最終的目標,大概就是完全褪去一身的外國習氣。看看 role (原作 rôle)、elite (原作 élite)、naive (原作 naïve),便可略知一二。

還在為英文裡外來語的變音符號而煩惱嗎?諸位除了看看我多年前寫的〈Comme ça le français! 略述法文的變音符號〉之外,下面這篇摘錄自 John List 為《線上牛津詞典》(Oxford Dictionaries Online) 所寫的文章,相信也能讓為此而煩惱的人士略感寬心吧!

Diacritics? They're just passé!

There is a moment in the life of every British 12-year-old in the first year of secondary school (that's high school, for non-Brits), when, sitting down in front of their French teacher for the first time, they are introduced to the mysteries of accented letters. The twenty-six letters that have served them so well for the past six years of primary school are no longer enough and they must learn to supplement the alphabet with the acute, grave, circumflex and cedilla. It's OK, they are told; you don't need to worry about these little marks in English.

But as any halfway observant child would tell you, what about the café down the road? Or the jalapeño peppers you and your fiancée enjoyed on your à la carte pizza, brought to you by a garçon? Washed down with a refreshing pint of Löwenbräu while reading a Brontë novel, no doubt. Or perhaps you're not as naïve as all that, dreaming as you were of a ménage à trois. No, that's probably a bit risqué, not to mention too much of a cliché. For somewhere so supposedly devoid of diacritic marks on our letters, we do seem to see an awful lot of them.

Of course, the English language has appropriated so many words from other languages that it would be extremely surprising were some of them to manage the transition unscathed. Most words gradually lose their accents on Anglicization; cafe is a perfect example of this as its occurrence without the accent is slowly overtaking that of café. Our lexicographers use the Oxford English Corpus to track the relative use of diacritic marks when deciding upon the preferred form of an imported word. Other words have left their diacritics behind completely, such as muesli (which has lost its umlaut on the u) or canyon (which is an Anglicization of the Spanish word cañon). Sometimes a word will retain its accent to preserve the pronunciation thus bestowed or to settle any ambiguity between the imported word and a similarly spelled existing English word. Thus we find maté and mate or the three outwardly similar but completely different words pâté, pâte, and pate. Occasionally we even encounter the same word entering English by two completely different routes, such as rosé and rose or the unexpected souffle and soufflé. Who knew that omitting that final e-acute could put you in hospital!

1 comment:

titi said...

英語和法語一個是水一個是麵粉,在我腦袋里一混就成了漿糊,然後我們再加上中文這個“雞蛋”,最後得出一堆“可麗餅”,哈哈哈哈哈哈。。。對不起呀老師,開個玩笑,別介意哈~~~