Re: English and French vowels
| From: | Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, March 6, 2004, 17:07 |
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En réponse à jcowan@REUTERSHEALTH.COM :
>In contexts where "le" *is* stressed, though (e.g. contrastively), it comes
>out /l2/, which suggests that [@] is /2/, at least some of the time.
>One might also claim that [@] is simply epenthetic, i.e. zero phonemically,
>though there are perhaps counterexamples to this.
I think you're mixing phonemic and phonetic notation here. The *phoneme*
/@/ exits definitely, as it's behaviour is unlike any other vowel in
French. For instance, /2/ will *never* elide, even in front of another
vowel (and you have at least one minimal pair: de /d@/ vs. deux /d2/), so
you cannot say that /@/ is /2/. Now, in cases where /@/ is stressed, it's
true that it will come out as [2]. But that's a purely *phonetic* result,
the stressed allophone of /@/. Since the discussion was about *phonemes*,
it still doesn't change my claim.
And [@] is *not* simply epenthetic. If it was, its presence or absence
could be described by rules of appearance. But it cannot. I can say in
Spoken French both [pti] or [p@ti] for "petit": "small" whatever the
environment. /@/ has a tendency to not be produced at all, but it's
certainly not a purely phonetic phenomenon.
>In February 2003 on this very list you were saying that though you had
>collapsed /A/ and /a/, you still had the four nasal vowels! So the change
>for you is very recent indeed...
>
>(
>
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0302D&L=conlang&D=0&P=19181
>)
>
> > > So you still have four distinct nasal vowels?
> >
> > Yep.
> >
> > > I had thought that most varieties of French were down to three.
> >
> > Indeed, but mine is only at the edge of losing them. Children born
> > currently will probably have only three nasal vowels, but most people
> > of my age still do have four.
> >
> > Christophe.