Eau (trigraph)

Eau is a trigraph which occurs in some languages that use the Latin script, such as French and English.

French

In Modern French, ⟨eau⟩ is pronounced /o/ ^[1] and often appears at the end of a word. Generally, ⟨eau⟩ alternates with ⟨e⟩ in another form of a word, for example, the feminine of chameau (camel) is chamelle. There are three main ways of spelling /o/: ⟨o⟩, ⟨au⟩, and ⟨eau⟩, out of which ⟨eau⟩ is by far the rarest. ^[2]

In Old French, ⟨eau⟩ represented a triphthong, probably pronounced [e̯aɯ̯] (or [ə̯aɯ̯]). This triphthong originated from the Proto-French diphthong [ɛɯ̯], which had formed from the sequence of ⟨e⟩ and ⟨l⟩, where L had vocalized. In the 12th and 13th centuries, both ⟨iau⟩ and ⟨eau⟩ were used ([i̯aɯ̯] was probably a variant pronunciation), but ⟨eau⟩ soon became the standard spelling. ^[3] Eau is also a word in French.

English

In English, ⟨eau⟩ only exists in words borrowed from French, and so is pronounced similarly in almost all cases (like in plateau , bureau ). Exceptions include beauty and words derived from it, where it is pronounced /juː/, bureaucrat where it is pronounced /ə/, bureaucracy where it is pronounced /ɒ/, ^[4] and (in some contexts) the proper names Beaulieu and Beauchamp (as /juː/ and /iː/, respectively). ^[5]

References

1. Sprenger-Charolles, Liliane [in French]; Siegel, Linda S.; Bonnet, Philippe (February 1998). "Reading and Spelling Acquisition in French: The Role of Phonological Mediation and Orthographic Factors" (PDF). Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. 68 (2): 134–165. doi:10.1006/jecp.1997.2422 . Retrieved 1 October 2023.
2. Stanké, Brigitte; Dumais, Christian (Autumn 2016). "Eau, au ou o ? Comment écrire le son /o/ ?" [Eau, au or o? How do you write the sound /o/?](PDF). Vivre le primaire (in French): 30. Retrieved 1 October 2023.
3. Morin, Yves Charles (2006). "Histoire des systèmes phonique et graphique du français" [History of the French phonic and graphic systems](PDF) (in French). Retrieved 1 October 2023.
4. Brooks, Greg (2015). "The grapheme-phoneme correspondences of English, 2: Graphemes beginning with vowel letters". Dictionary of the British English Spelling System (1 ed.). Open Book Publishers. pp. 378–379. ISBN   978-1-78374-108-3 . Retrieved 30 September 2023.
5. Emerson, Ralph H. (1997). "English Spelling and Its Relation to Sound" . American Speech. 72 (3): 269, 286. doi:10.2307/455654. ISSN   0003-1283 . Retrieved 1 October 2023.