Recently, a certain phenomenon has come to my attention. But first, let me give background info. When writing French, accent marks are very important: they tell you how to pronounce the letter they're over, and/or they can change the meaning of a word. (For example, "a" means "has" as in "he has," and "à" means "to" as in "I went to the circus.") There are several accent marks that come up in French.
The accent aigue: é
The accent grave: è
The accent cedille: ç
The accent trema: ï
And the accent circonflexe: ê, ô, î, â
The accent circonflexe is the wierd one, because it doesn't actually change anything about the word. There's no point to it being there. An i with an accent circonflexe is pronounced exactly the same as one without it. That has always bothered me.
Until my professer threw something out in class about it. She has a habit of throwing out tasty linguistic tidbits. The accent circonflexe shows where, historically, there was an s sound. There are certain words in English that are cognates of French words with the circonflexe that still retain that s. For example:
vestments, vest --- vêtements (clothes)
hostel --- hôtel (hotel)
coast--- côte (coast, side)
island, isle --- île (island)
forest --- forêt (forest)
forest --- forêt (forest)
ass --- âne (donkey)
That last one makes me chuckle.
Seriously, though. Consistently, French words with the accent circonflexe have a related English word that has an s there instead.
So, if these words are related, then the accent circonflexe-ing happened after English got its French influence. What I can't figure out is why. How did an s get turned into an accent that doesn't change the sound of the word at all?
In the words of Amélie's father when presented with pictures of his traveling garden gnome: Je ne comprends pas!
That IS interesting! It may have something to do with the way s sounds tend to get weeded out of Latin-based speech. In Spanish, for example, words with an s ending tend to be pronounces without the s at the end by native speakers. "Buenas noches" becomes "Buena noche," even pluralized words like "casas," or "zapatas" are pronounced "casa" and "zapata" in speech. If French has this tendency as well, or did historically, to the point that even proper speech leaves out the sound, it may be considered grammatically proper to include that marking to indicate where the s once was.
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