Re: English and French vowels

En réponse à Douglas Koller, Latin & French :


>I've heard you say this before, and wept openly. I love my /9~/ (if
>that's the "un" of "brun" (not "brin"!)).
You're correct. And believe me, I love mine too, and can readily produce it 
if needed :) . But it's not part of my active phoneme inventory anymore, 
just like /A/ isn't either (but still having it somewhere in me helped me a 
lot when learning Dutch :)) ).

>  Well, I'm foreign and
>haven't been to France in 20 years, and I'm a curmudgeon, so I'll
>keep "un" defiantly and be labeled a "personne vieux jeu".
I doubt people even hear the difference nowadays. Most French people are 
not as phone-aware as I am :)) .

>  Thus far,
>natives ain't complained (though who knows how long they've been out
>of the loop :) ).
I think they just don't hear the difference between /9~/ and /E~/ anymore, 
that's all :) .
___________________________________________________________________________
En réponse à Roger Mills :


>IIRC /A/ was often kind-of a conditioned variant....
Not really. I know at least one minimal pair: patte /pat/ vs. pâte /pAt/, 
now both /pat/. The first means "leg", the second "pasta". As the second 
indicates, /A/ often arised from a lost coda /s/ :) .

>  but I certainly don't
>lament the loss of /9~/, the absolute horreur of my attempts to speak
>French.........
LOL. The sound can be tricky indeed.

>Why do you think /9~/ was lost?  Of course it had minimal functional load
>(aside from rather frequent "un", I can only think of "parfum"*....).
Well, there was also "brun": "brown" which contrasted with "brin": 
"strand", and quite a few other words. Everywhere you find a word written 
with "un" or "um" (with the nasal belonging to the same syllable, not to 
the next one), you have a word with /9~/. There are quite a few.

>   Did
>it come to have "bad" associations?
Not per se, but it's true that /9~/ is an onomatopoeia with a rather 
negative connotation (for the one uttering it that is. It's supposed to be 
the sound stupid people make when they don't understand you. But then, /E~/ 
has the same connotation, being the single phoneme of the word "hein" used 
in questions to mean "what?".

>  Or conversely, did someone prestigious
>have the merger with /E~/ ?  (Oh my-- De Gaulle springs to mind, but I can't
>imagine him mispronouncing _anything_.....but ¿quién sabe?)  Surely someone
>has researched the question.
AFAIK, De Gaulle pronounced everything *perfectly*, including /9~/ and /A/. 
But you know, sound changes often come from unbalanced systems. In the case 
of /9~/, it sticked out like a sore thumb compared as the only front 
rounded nasal, when French had two front unrounded nasals and only one 
other rounded one, which was back (and still is :) ). It was close to /E~/, 
was often used but didn't make many minimal pairs with it, and didn't fit 
well among nasals, so it merged easily with /E~/. I guess the same story 
applies to /A/ (being the *only* back unrounded vowel, it certainly was out 
of place in the French system of oral vowels :)) ).

>------------------------------
>*And of course P.Sellers/Insp.Clouseau's "bump"
I just *love* when Clouseau goes to a hotel and asks for a [R2:m] :)))) .

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

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