USAGE: Louis? C'est lui (was Re: Russian orthography (was: A perfect day ...))

Quoth Christophe Grandsire:
> At 12:52 31/01/00 -0500, you wrote:
> >Yes, to my Russian ear French consonants sound palatalized before /j/, and
> >maybe slightly palatalized before /i/. Besides, French velars seem to be
> >palatalized before any front vowel and word-finally after /i/. Very
> >different from English: even the initial cluster in 'new' sounds to me
> >rather as [n]+[j], without palatalization on [n].
>
> I agree with you. I hear "new" nearly like /niju/ with a very short
> /i/.  It's interesting to know how foreigners hear your native
> language, it helps you recognize some features you didn't see before.
> Your description seems to fit rather well my pronunciation, and yet
> before you said it I was unaware of that :) .
One of the most striking French-isms that *no* book tells you is the
palatal consonant after high vowels.  Actually, I suspect it may be
Québecois, because I definitely heard it there, but all my French
teachers but one have it.  On words ending in /i/ (esp /yi/) or /y/,
there is usually a /C/ tacked on, often very prominently.  Sometimes
(rarely) it's almost an /S/.  After /u/ it's much fainter and more of a
/x/.

So Christophe, what's the word?  Is this a hick pronunciation, or
Québecois, or what?

Quoth Raymond Brown:
> That's right - written with an inverted {h} in IPA, but usually as [H]
> in various "ASCII IPAs".   Whereas, of course, the semivowel of
> 'Louis' is back rounded semivowel [w].
The pedant in me forces me to say: the only scheme with [H] for turned-h
is SAMPA.  The rest have: j<rnd> ;h h&  and  w" .  Not very good choices
any of them, I'm afraid.

--
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