I don’t get this. “Clique” in French is pronounced klik, just like in English. It doesn’t have any accent marks in it in French.
“Niche” doesn’t have any accents either, although it is pronounced “neesh” in French and often pronounced either way (nitch or neesh) in English.
The accents aren’t needed because the final e’s aren’t pronounced. The accent serves to tell you to say the e, as in liberté (otherwise it would sound something like “libert”). The other thing, the circumflex tells you there used to be an S following the vowel: Hôtel.
Now, a french pronunciation is another thing altogether. But it isn´t a “French Accent”
Nope, it’s an auberge de jeunesse which litterally means a ‘youth inn’.
Le Big Mac
Hey Doobieous, I know how the diacritical marks work in French. I speak it pretty much fluently. I was commenting on Trigonal Planar’s remark when he said that “It drives me insane when I hear people say it the non-accented way - “nitch” and “click”…sounds like the name of some kind of bug that lives in your armpits.” I didn’t understand what he meant since 1) there are no diacritical marks in either of those words in French; and 2) they are pronounced the same way in English as they are in French, with the sometime exception of “niche,” which some people pronounce “nitch” in English. However, “clique” is pronounced the same way in both languages. I may be misunderstanding TP’s post: I assumed he was discussing diacritical marks (accents) when he might really have been referring to pronounciation (accents).
Missbunny, indeed I was referring to the french pronunciation.
klEEK vs click
nEEsh vs. nitch
The non-accented-pronunciations just sound gross.
What do they call a Whopper?
Gross as they may sound, niche as “nitch” and clique as “click” are correct. The French pronunciations are also acceptable. Clique as “cleek” is extremely stilted to my ears, but YMMV.
Basically, I always use the accents when they make a difference to pronunciation. We don’t pronounce fiancé and fiancée “feeyonce” and “feeyoncee.” And we don’t pronounce naïve “nave.”
(That’s also why I don’t put the accents on Montreal, Quebec, or metro – we don’t pronounce them Montrayal, Quaybec, or maytro in English.)
Interesting. Click for clique sounds odd to me, but I’ve become used to it. I hear it from my wife, but we come from two different places.
At my high school (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), it was pronounced cleek. At my wife’s high school (Pueblo, Colorado, USA), it was apparently pronounced click.
Perhaps this is one of those regional things? That’s our usual rationale for this situation; we have learned to stay far away from the “You’re not pronouncing _____ correctly” arguments.