| A glance through any English weekly or review, or, indeed, any English newspaper of the slightest intellectual pretension will show how far this tendency has gone. All the foreign words that English must perforce employ for want of native terms of precisely the same import are carefully italicized and accented, e. g., matinèe, cafè, crêpe, dèbut, portiére, èclat, naïvetè, règime, rôle, soirèe, prècis, protègè, èlite, gemütlichkeit, mêlèe, tête-á-tête, porte-cochére, divorcèe, fiancèe, weltpolitik, weltschmerz, muzhik, ukase, dènouement. Even good old English words have been displaced by foreign analogues thought to be more elegant, e. g., repertory by rèpertoire, sheik by shaikh, czar by tsar, levee by levèe, moslem by muslim, khalifate by khilifat, said by seyd, crape by crêpe, supper by souper, Legion of Honor by Lègion d’honneur, gormand by gourmand, grip by la grippe, crown by krone. Proper names also yield to this new pedantry, and the London Times frequently delights the aluminados by suddenly making such substitutions as that of Serbia for Servia and that of Rumania for Roumania; in the course of time, if the warnings of the S. P. E. do not prevail, the English may be writing München, Kobenhavn, Napoli, Wien, Warszava, Bruxelles and s’Gravenhage; even today they commonly use Hannover, Habana and Leipzig. Nearly all the English papers are careful about the diacritical marks in proper names, e. g., Sévres, Zürich, Bülow, François, Frèdèric, Hèloise, Bogotà, Orlèans, Besançon, Rhône, Côted’Or, Württemberg. The English dictionaries seldom omit the accents from recent foreign words. Cassell’s leaves them off règime |
