Re: French r

Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:

> En réponse à Andreas Johansson :
> >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.
Swedish has this funny combination of stress accent and two word tones, known
as acute and grave accent. Unfortunately, I'm essentially tone-deaf, and can't
really describe it (I rely mostly on context to tell the minimal pairs
apart, 'mafraid). "Marseljäsen" should have acute, I believe, which ought to
mean the pitch peaks on the stressed syllable.

BP or Daniel can surely tell you more.

Some dialects would, of course, have [R\s] instead of [s`], but while that
might sound more French, from what you say it shouldn't sound more Marseillais.

                                                     Andreas

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