# French speakers: Why accent grave in "très"?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/french-speakers-why-accent-grave-in-tres/596900
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [September 20, 2011, 2:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/french-speakers-why-accent-grave-in-tres/596900 "2011-09-20T02:08:38Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@Jaledin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jaledin)
#### Post date: [September 25, 2011, 6:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/french-speakers-why-accent-grave-in-tres/596900/21 "2011-09-25T06:30:58Z")
> [@Sal\_Ammoniac](#):
>
> But are you amézed, or amèzed? Anyway, I don’t want to speak for all French teachers, but a certain number, let’s say – including my junior high school French teacher – didn’t make (or perhaps didn’t know of) the distinction between the two sounds.
Look it up, or talk to a person who speaks Parisian French. “Mais” does NOT sound like … I can’t do the accent with my keyboard. It does sound like the phoneme represented above.
I grant that there are different accents, but that’s not a tolerable mistake.
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### Author:  [@psychonaut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/psychonaut)
#### Post date: [September 25, 2011, 7:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/french-speakers-why-accent-grave-in-tres/596900/22 "2011-09-25T07:02:44Z")
> [@KarlGauss](#):
>
> Please teach me: is a lax vowel in the final position like the sound which ends the informal, ‘meh’ (a sound of indifference or contempt)?
Yes, it is.
As with all rules, there are some exceptions to this one. Most notably, the schwa (/ə/) is permitted in word-final position (as in “paramecia”). Some odd interjections and colloquialisms may also get away with it, such as your “meh” (/mɛ/) and also “yeah” (/jæː/). But in general, you’re not going to find any words in Standard American English ending in /ɪ/, /ɛ/, /æ/, /ʊ/, or /ʌ/ (the lax vowels in the words “pit”, “pet”, “pat”, “put”, and “putt”). (YMMV if your dialect is sufficiently different.)
This causes problems for native English speakers not only with French but also for other languages which permit these vowels at the end of a word. For example, Icelandic is full of words ending in /ɪ/, and English speakers routinely pronounce them as ending in /i/. This can lead to confusion as there are some pairs of words which differ only in this final vowel.
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### Author:  [@hibernicus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hibernicus)
#### Post date: [September 25, 2011, 10:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/french-speakers-why-accent-grave-in-tres/596900/23 "2011-09-25T10:20:32Z")
> [@CookingWithGas](#):
>
> I studied French for years in high school and never thought about this until I was helping my 13-year-old with his homework last night. The “e” in “très” is pronounced eɪ so I would have thought it would be spelled “trés.” I probably would’ve gotten it right if I weren’t thinking about it so hard. But why is it this way and how do I explain this to help him remember it?
To all the excellent explanations above, I want to add a piece of advice, as a fellow non-native speaker of French.
The one, single thing that you and your son can do for your pronunciation to sound more French and less American is to lose the [eɪ], especially in word-final position, and substitute the pure vowels [e] (for example, _illimité_) or [ɛ] (for example, _mais_).
It is not so important to distinguish between these two sounds, but it is important not to render them as an English-style [ei].
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