Are there any pairs of words like "beloved"/"belovèd", "learned"/"learnèd" that maintain a semantic difference to the present day?

Question

When I first read Romeo and Juliet in high school, I remember being intrigued by pairs of words such as,

beloved/belovèd

and

learned/learnèd

where there's an accent grave on the 'e' of the last syllable of one of each pair of word.

One thing I've always thought is that, strictly interpreted, beloved can really only be used as an adjective; if one wants to refer to the noun, as in my beloved, it should properly spelt as belovèd. Similarly, I've always thought that learned is, strictly speaking, only acceptable as the past tense of the verb to learn, and that if one wanted to refer to the adjective form meaning "educated", as in learned scholar, it would properly be spelt as learnèd. I don't remember where exactly I got these impressions from, and I don't know if they are correct.

So my question is: Were there or is there any semantic difference between such pairs of words, or is it just a spelling idiosyncrasy? If there were such differences, do any persist to the present day?

Addendum: These aren't the only such pairs; there are others, I distinctly remember seeing many in lots of Shakespeare's plays...

Answer 1

There is definitely a difference in the meaning of dogged (verb past tense, one syllable) and doggèd (adjective, two syllables), even though they're both generally spelled without the accent.

Shakespeare used both forms, and seems to have pronounced dogged with one syllable, and doggèd with two.

Whose reputation will be dogg'd with curses; —Coriolanus.
And dogged York that reaches at the moon, —Henry VI.

Answer 2

Shakespeare was also known to omit words or provide superfluous wording in order to achieve iambic pentameter. The accent was merely a means to achieve iambic pentameter as well, providing accents to correct pronunciation.

I wouldn't look much beyond that.

Answer 3

I have been noticing that in my church, a Lutheran one in Dallas, TX, persons reading scripture are more often than in the past pronouncing "blessed" with one syllable. For instance, I always used to, and still do, use 2 syllables for the beatitudes ("Blessed are the poor...") but I've noticed many readers just using one. I would use one syllable in saying "I have been blessed" or "He has led a blessed life" though I think some people might use two in the second example. I haven't seen any Bibles with accent marks on "blessed."

Answer 4

The reflects an interesting and, in my opinion, underused aspect of the English language— accents. The grave accent (à) is used to denote a pronounced vowel, hence learned is pronounced /lɜrnd/, while learnèd would be pronounced /lɜrnɪd/. The accent isn't used for a particular kind of word, just to assist with the pronunciation.

Also, if you're interested, there are other accents used occasionally in English:

• An acute accent (á) marks a stressed syllable, for example: rébel v. rebél.
• A circumflex was used as over the letter O to abbreviate 〈ough〉 (when the 〈gh〉 wasn't pronounced) so that thorough might be spelt thorô. This usage, however, was mostly confined to 18th century British English.
• Diaeresis are used to denote a separate vowel sound, they can be used in words such as zoology, which can be written as zoölogy so the reader knows to say z͞oo-ŏlōgy, not z͞oo-lōgy. Diaeresis are also somtimes used in the name Zoë, when pronounced /ˈzoʊ.i/, to to diferentiate it from Zoe, when pronounced /ˈzoʊ/.

Answer 5

Off the top of my head:

• Banished/banishèd (a Shakespearean word, actually from Romeo and Juliet)

Pinched from Wikipedia:

• Lēad/lĕad
• Mate/maté

Pinched from other answers here but which I agree with:

• Dogged/doggèd
• Blessed/blessèd

It's most interesting to note how different the meanings are despite the words being spelt the same. Even the difference between beloved and belovèd caught me by surprise.

I would agree that these words are only properly spelt with accents, but I wonder as to the difficulty of knowing all the instances for which accents should be used. Within that issue is the sometimes confusing use of the diaeresis.

On the other hand, diacritics should certainly be used where present in the original language word on which an English word is predicated.

The next problem is how to pronounce loanwords that are incorrectly pronounced in English.

Answer 6

There is no semantic difference between word pairs like “beloved”/“belovèd”, “learned”/“learnèd”. One of the few rules of English usage that has no exceptions, special cases, or irregular forms :-)

The grave accent tells a speaker to sound the accented syllable rather than to swallow it.