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Re: English and French vowels

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Friday, March 5, 2004, 21:29
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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Douglas Koller, Latin & French <latinfrench@...>Une Question
Douglas Koller, Latin & French <latinfrench@...>