One of those occasions where I’m reading, and just go “oh” at a realization. Reading through Wikipedia’s article on diacritic marks, I couldn’t help but notice a superb example of both what sound diacritics represent and homographs in my language.
A homograph is on for more words that are spelled the same, but differ in the pronunciation or meaning. Something that, frankly as a native English speaker, I rarely notice. I’m not sure if that’s because of many fail to stand out that audibly when you’re been made accustomed to spelling our fucked up language from an early age, or not.
Loanwords that frequently appear with the diacritic in English include café, résumé or resumé (a usage that helps distinguish it from the verb resume), soufflé, and naïveté (see English terms with diacritical marks).
I have to say that résumé / resume is a great example of this in common English. The difference between ‘re-su-may’ and ‘re-zoom’ is spoken distinctly, but in writing is usually rendered the same leaving it to context to understand. Whether that happens to be the logical context, or you know the whole difference between nouns and verbs. Diacritics are increasingly less common outside of publications who care, and virtually unused by the common people writing shit be it by pencil or typed text.
I’ve always been kind of fascinated by such words in other languages, along with words where the distinction in pronunciation between two words are more subtle in how it alters the meaning.
In some ways, I think it is a little sad that diacritic marks are less common in actual practice because of the mess that is English spelling and its representation to how we pronounce words. Diacritics greatly help disambiguate sounds in ways that are less clear (at least to me) without relying on memorization; or as I remember it, literally having English all but beaten into my as a child. In English, we’re pretty much just forced to learn the various oddballs until we remember them. It’s a problem that becomes even more relevant when presented with loanwords and their bastardizations into the vernacular.
For example without knowing nor marking the sounds, the word ‘souffle’ is kind of a “What the fuck did I just read?” kind of word in English. I assume it makes sense in French. Perhaps in English, you might read it and think ‘so-uf-fle’ or ‘sou-uf-fle’ because of words like shuffle (‘shuf-fle’) and soup (sou-oup), which are frankly far more common words outside of the kitchen (and perhaps even within). Yet soufflé is clear as ‘sou-flay’, a word people will probably hear more often than see unless they study French cooking. Whether constructs like ‘ou’ or ‘o͞o’ or hell, even plain ‘oo’, would be a better way to spell a word like soup, are fair debate. Particularly if you discount the existing domination of how letters are input on computers and (gasp!) typewriters. But such things are unlikely to ever change that drastically, given how much now depends on relatively slow to change language practices. Diacritics are darn useful but underused IMHO.
Coincidentally, a lot of the constructs in American English that I find difficult to spell, often have relationships to old French and bastardized latin by way there of. The more germanic influences on English might be more gross in influence, but I tend to find more orderly. I suppose, I should just thank goodness that English has relatively simple constructs compared to more inflection heavy and gendered languages.