Lost Letters in French
In French orthography, there are diacritics, such as the acute accent, the grave accent, and the circumflex.
A function of the circumflex accent in French is to denote letters, usually the letter s, that used to be in the spelling of words but no longer.
Let us see what happens when we replace the letter e with a circumflex with the letters ‘es’ in certain words.
Examples
forêt “forest” = forest
hôpital “hospital” = hospital
hôtel “hotel” = hostel
Anglophones can use this knowledge to guess the meaning of French words that have a circumflex. However, this method will not be always accurate due to changes in meaning since the French word was first imported into English.
In other cases, a circumflex exists in words, so there is no ambiguity between similar words.
Example
du vs. dû
The former means “of the” while the latter is the past participle of the French verb devoir “to have to do something”.
