Re: French r

En réponse à Andreas Johansson :

> >
> > Wrong. As I already said, the uvular trill allophone existed only in Paris
> > and has now completely disappeared. On the other hand, quite a few French
> > dialects have an *alveolar* trill or flap for r. They are mainly dialects
> > of the Mediterranean coast (listen to any Marseillais talk, and you won't
> > hear a single uvular sound ever! :))) ).
>
>I read somewhere that the Swedishified pronunciation of "La Marseillaise" -
>something like [mas`El'jE:s(En)] (where the paranthesized bit is the Swedish
>definite article, of course) - sounds, to Frenchmen, very Marseillais. Any
>truth to this?
Not according to your transcription (although it could be that the 
retroflex s is heard as an alveolar r+s cluster. That sounds plausible to 
me). But does Swedish have any pitch accent or a similar pitch feature 
associated to the stress you wrote? If so, associated with the strong 
lengthening of the stressed vowel, it could have an influence on how we 
hear it. Two of the main features of Marseillais is that it lengthens 
stressed vowels more than most French accents and has quite a strong 
melody, close to a pitch accent (but still subsumed to the stress accent). 
A third feature is that it oftens pronounces final schwas.

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

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