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Comment by ggambetta | Hacker News Reader

"Mate", not "maté". I guess it's cool to add random accents to foreign words to make them look more exotic, but this changes the pronunciation of the word and in fact turns into a different one.

"Mate" refers to "yerba mate" (as in the article) or even the gourd used to consume it; it's also a common abbreviation of "jaque mate", "checkmate". "Maté", on the other hand, means "I killed".

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For what it's worth, Wikipedia includes this explanation:

> "In English, "mate" is occasionally written "maté", to distinguish it from other meanings of the word mate, although this spelling is not used in Spanish or Portuguese."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerba_mate

A similar example is "résumé", so as to not be confused with "resume".

Going further down the Wikipedia hole, here's a page describing use of diacritics in English, which includes a subsection on "Accent-addition and accent-removal":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical...

“résumé” is not really a similar example, because that is the actual spelling of the word in French. Edit: but according to your link sometimes only the latter accent is kept in English.

Yeah, it varies depending on your dictionary or stylebook. For example, MW lists:

> "résumé ... variants: or resume or less commonly resumé"

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/resume

"résumé" (with accents) is a french word that means summary.

Yes, and the origin is that a résumé was a summary of your curriculum vitae, listing only the most recent/relevant parts whereas the CV was complete list of your 'life course' including all your work history, accomplishments and accreditations, no matter how long that may be.

Now, at least in industry in North America, the CV has largely disappeared. It still exists in academia and in Europe the term exists but the content is usually abbreviated like a resume.

Actually, European CVs are usually shorter than American résumés :)

I've also seen sake (the Japanese beverage) spelled as saké, presumably to distinguish it from the English word "sake."

Usually you can infer the meaning of the word from its context, but the accent gives English speakers a better idea of how to pronounce it.

Reading this directly reminded me of a great poem "The Chaos" by Gerard Nolst Trenité (or is it Trenite? ;):

http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

Can't think of many non-constructed phrases where the meaning of "mate" would be ambiguous. "Drinking mate with my mates" (as many a hipster tech Londoner do in the startup scene :P). "I'm drinking my mate" should never be confusing outside of liquid cannibal circles!

The accent isn't there to make it look exotic, it's there to clarify the pronunciation. English steals é from French, not Spanish. Without the accent it wouldn't be obvious that it's supposed to be an ae diphthong. (Obviously it's still non-obvious, but it's a reasonable spelling.)

Hmm. Makes sense, but I'm not convinced. Borrowing an é from French also doesn't give you the correct pronunciation, since the French and the Spanish é sound different (and since Spanish does have an accented e, it makes the whole thing more confusing!). It's MAT-eh, not mat-AY. And now I feel a bit like Hermione Granger :(

It gives you the correct English pronunciation. The point isn't to make a perfect phonentic alphabet, it's to distinguish between the English word "mate" and the Spanish loan-word "maté" which have different pronunciations. And I don't think the distinction between eh and ay as you've laid out is very meaningful to a native English speaker. Depending on where you are those may be pronounced exactly the same.

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