> Sure it is, continuously and gradually.
There has been no success to any attempts to regularize the spelling of English in... what, over a century now? Is the New Yorker still the only major publication insisting on using umlauts? :)
I'm not saying that English won't evolve, mind you, only that English spelling will evolve [a lot] more slowly than the rest of the language.
> IIRC, and its been a long time since I studied French or made use of anything but the the most basic bits, for each vowel there is a consistent (in the general case, but there may be exceptions) pronunciation change associated with the now-elided “s”, so the circumflex serves both historical and phonetic purposes.
Wikipedia says it alters the sound of a, e, and o. But I would pronounce château and chateau substantially the same. I would pronounce fantôme slightly differently from fantome. Être and etre, on the other hand, would have substantially different pronunciations.
There has been no success to any attempts to regularize the spelling of English in... what, over a century now? Is the New Yorker still the only major publication insisting on using umlauts? :)
I'm not saying that English won't evolve, mind you, only that English spelling will evolve [a lot] more slowly than the rest of the language.
> IIRC, and its been a long time since I studied French or made use of anything but the the most basic bits, for each vowel there is a consistent (in the general case, but there may be exceptions) pronunciation change associated with the now-elided “s”, so the circumflex serves both historical and phonetic purposes.
Wikipedia says it alters the sound of a, e, and o. But I would pronounce château and chateau substantially the same. I would pronounce fantôme slightly differently from fantome. Être and etre, on the other hand, would have substantially different pronunciations.