Re: French spelling scheme

Christophe Grandsire wrote:

>En réponse à Roger Mills <romilly@...>:
>
>>
>> Your [ajDr=] strikes me as more in line with US pronunciation (i.e.
>> those
>> who don't say [i:Dr=]).   I had an English teacher in high-school, a
>> born-and-bred New Englander of distinguished family, who said [IDr=];
>> he
>> also pronounced "drama" as [dr&m@(r)].  Quite unique; he was easy to
>> imitate!
>>
>
>Well, in France people are actually taught one of both pronunciations in
free
>variation, depending on the teacher (that's to say, some will be taught
[ajDr=]
>while others [i:Dr=]). I've seen the same phenomenon in Spanish, where I
was
>first taught that "ll" was consistently pronounced [j] (by my half-Spanish
>Spanish teacher). When I arrived in High School and took Spanish classes
with
>students coming from other schools, I discovered that quite a few of them
had
>been taught to pronounce "ll" as [l_j]. I kept on saying [j] though, and no
>teacher ever said that I was mispronouncing :) .>

That's certainly true of Spanish, where [l_j] is Castillian (sometimes or at
least formerly considered the "standard"), [j] almost everyone else.
Majority rule!

English [ajDr=], 50 or so years ago at least, used to be considered Eastern
(New York/Boston)-- as well as cultured, educated.   In the rest of the
country (Mid-west especially) it was [iDr=], and [ajDr=] was considered an
affectation.  That's less true nowadays, probably because of the generalized
speech we've been hearing on TV for a long time.

Very few people IME have [iDr=] ~ [ajD=r] in free variation, unlike
"economics", where we might say it with initial /i/ in one sentence, /E/ in
the next......

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