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Eau (trigraph)

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Eau is a trigraph which occurs in some languages that use the Latin script, such as French and English.

French

In Modern French, eau is pronounced /o/[1] and often appears at the end of a word. Generally, eau alternates with e in another form of a word, for example, the feminine of chameau (camel) is chamelle. There are three main ways of spelling /o/: o, au, and eau, out of which eau is by far the rarest.[2]

In Old French, eau represented a triphthong, probably pronounced [e̯aɯ̯] (or [ə̯aɯ̯]). This triphthong originated from the Proto-French diphthong [ɛɯ̯], which had formed from the sequence of e and l, where L had vocalized. In the 12th and 13th centuries, both iau and eau were used ([i̯aɯ̯] was probably a variant pronunciation), but eau soon became the standard spelling.[3] Eau is also a word in French.

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English

In English, eau only exists in words borrowed from French, and so is pronounced similarly in almost all cases (like in plateau, bureau). Exceptions include beauty and words derived from it, where it is pronounced /juː/, bureaucrat where it is pronounced /ə/, bureaucracy where it is pronounced /ɒ/,[4] and (in some contexts) the proper names Beaulieu and Beauchamp (as /juː/ and /iː/, respectively).[5]

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References

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