Re: English and French vowels
| From: | Roger Mills <romilly@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, March 5, 2004, 0:58 |
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Christophe wrote:
>The two vowels /A/ and /9~/ that used to be part of the French vowel system
up to only twenty years ago have now completely disappeared (I have
witnessed them vanish from everyone's speech, *including mine*! :) A very
good proof of the existence of sound changes *during* people's life, not
only during the learning of language by children). /A/ has merged with /a/,
and /9~/ with /E~/.
IIRC /A/ was often kind-of a conditioned variant.... but I certainly don't
lament the loss of /9~/, the absolute horreur of my attempts to speak
French.........
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"*....). Did
it come to have "bad" associations? 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.
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*And of course P.Sellers/Insp.Clouseau's "bump"