Re: A perfect day for introducing myself

At 03:37 28/01/00 -0500, you wrote:
>
>[vas'íl'ij jEvg'Én'jEv'iC' C'Ernóf]. Do you see the diacritics?
        Without any problem :) .

>Apostrophe denotes palatalization of the preceding consonant
>(non-phonological in [C] = [t_S]). Atonic [a] is often transcribed
>with the same sign as the English vowel in *cut* or *luck*.
>
        Do you mean that in your patronimic name, the palatal n' is followed by
the approximant /j/? I don't know if I could make any difference between
the cluster /n'j/ and a simple /n'/ (I can make a difference between /n'/
and /nj/, but /n'j/ is to difficult for me I think).

>I believe that [ij] is more or less like in the French *fille*, and for
>me, French *gn* in *signal* sounds very much like Russian [n']. But it
>may be different for a French speaker, since in fact the articulations
>differ a lot (AFAIK ;) ).
        I think you're right. /ij/ is exactly the sound of *fille*, and gn is a
palatal n. But as Russian has palatalization of all (or nearly all?)
consonnants, there's a difference in quality. French used to have
palatalized n and l (palatal l is the one that became /j/ in *fille*,
explaining the strange writing convention :) ), but now it has only 'gn'.
Or maybe phonetically we still have palatalized consonnants in words like
'mien' (mine) /m'E~/ or /mjE~/? I think I pronounce more the first one, but
I'm pretty sure I heard the last one too.

>
>Do you preserve non-final stress in foreign names when speaking French?
>
        Generally not. I try to do it whenever I can (that's to say when I know
where the stress is :) ), but most people find it useless and pompuous.
When I don't really pay attention to my talking, I do like any other
French: I use the French rule of final stress.

                                                        Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://rainbow.conlang.org