An interesting pattern in English-French translation?

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There are a few words I can think of (and maybe a true bilingual can think of more examples) where the letter "s" in English becomes "é" or "e" in French and vice-versa. Well, not all the words are spelled the exact same otherwise, but you can notice a pattern. Here are a few examples:

étape --> step
étage --> stage
épeler --> to spell
épine --> spine
école --> school (this is close enough, considering the "h" is not pronounced anyway=P)
espèce --> species
espace -->space
épice --> spice

So does anyone have any idea why this is the case? Why do the french like to pronounce "e" instead of an "s" sound??

P.S., as a side joke, maybe the french should call "sports" "éports" from now on, just to fit the pattern=P

In Spanish we have "es"
épine --> spine --> espina
école --> school --> escuela
espèce --> species --> especies
espace --> space --> espacio
épice --> spice --> especia

Actually most of these words came from Old French into English. And Old French took them from Latin.

And it's not about the <e> but more about <sp>
There is no native <sp> onset (initial) syllable in French phonology, so they had to add <e> in order to be able to pronounce it.
So, Latin "spatio" became "espace" in Old French. When English incorporated these words from Old French, they dropped the <e> again. (otherwise it would become es-pace or e-space because English is quite able to pronounce <sp> at the beginning of a word)

Perhaps somebody can elaborate on that further.



Old French calls it "desport"

The reason is quite simple, and NakaCristo's example is indeed related to it. The reason is: etymology, and language change.

As you may already know, languages changes. Pronunciation, grammar, syntax, the meaning of words, everything changes with time, and differently for different speaking communities. That's why the Latin language of Rome eventually became the various Romance languages like Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Romanian: different changes in different places at different times caused the same language to split up into various descendants.

Now, all the words you mention in French originally started with s+consonant (for instance, "école" comes from Latin "schola", "épine" from Latin "spina", and étape from Middle Dutch "stapel" -the first two are inherited directly, the third one was a loanword at the time of Middle French). But for some unfathomable reason, for a long time (during the time of Old and Middle French, i.e. from the 8th century to approximately the 18th century), French people felt like they couldn't pronounce words starting with s+consonant, and had to add an "e-" sound before it to be able to pronounce it correctly. This constraint also happened in Spanish, where it is still valid (hence NakaCristo's examples). So from "schola" came "escole", from "spina" "espine", and from "stapel" "estape".
Then what happened is that for a short time, people stopped pronouncing an "s" sound between a vowel and a consonant. So "escole" became "école", "espine" became "épine", and "estape" became "étape". This change was only short-lived, which explains why we still have "s" in words like "espèce" or "espace": those are two learned words that were reborrowed from Latin (then used as the language of literature and science) at a time when French people still needed to add "e-" before "s+consonant" but didn't remove that "s" anymore. The case of "espèce" is very interesting, as it is a reborrowing from Latin "species". But that Latin word has also a direct descendant in French, and that is the word "épice" (which shows both the addition of "e-" and the removal of "s"). So both the words "épice" and "espèce" come from the same Latin word "species". They just entered the French language at a different moment in time.

What about the English words then? Things are slightly more complicated:
- some English words got borrowed from Latin directly, like "school", from Latin "schola" via proto-Germanic "skola" (the ancestor of all Germanic languages like English, German and Dutch), "species" from Latin "species" (naturally );
- some English words got actually borrowed from Old French, at a time when the "e-" addition was still unstable, so they borrowed it without that "e-". "Spice", "spell" and "space", for instance, are examples of such words;
- some English words are cognates of the French words, i.e. they are indirectly related by having the same ancestor. For instance, English "step" comes from the same word as Dutch word "stapel" that gave "étape" in French.
In the end, the main thing here is that English never had the constraint that a word starting with s+consonant couldn't be pronounced as is, so those words didn't change in English (other changes did happen, like the one that caused "school"'s vowel to be pronounced as it is).

If you wonder about that "not being able to pronounce s+consonant" thing, think that English people seem unable to pronounce the "p" in words like "psychology", while French and Spanish people have no such problem. It's the same thing, except that it's been solved in Modern English by removing the first consonant rather than add a vowel in front of it.

As for why "sport" is the French word rather than *éport", that's because it's a recent borrowing from English, after the constraint about s+consonant stopped (i.e. French people suddenly realised they could pronounce s+consonant just fine). The fun part of this English word ("sports") is that it's also a borrowing from Old French "desport", a variant of "deport", which can be found in Spanish "deporte": "sports". So a French word got borrowed into English, and then borrowed back when the French lost that word for some reason (while the Spanish never lost it). Such complicated phenomena are quite common when looking at language over time, which is why it can be so challenging to study .

I have a question...don't languages evolve through speech or does it evolve through writing as well?

I always thought that writing was not as common back then (most people were illiterate) and so language mostly evolved through speech.

In China, they have one writing system (until recently when they created the Simplified writing system) and so everyone understood the written language but some dialects are so different from each other that you would not be able to understand the speech of another dialect without previous training.