Re: French spelling scheme

En réponse à Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>:

[snip of interesting historical features]

>
> As far as I can see - (b) and (c) are almost diametrically opposed.
> French
> has, without question, departed further from its Vulgar Latin 'mother'
> than
> any of its 'sister' languages have.  If, indeed, you represent spoken
> French, the orthography must surely depart even more from other
> Romance
> languages.
>
Indeed. That's why I like French orthography. I think it is already the optimum
when you want to agree (b) and (c) together.

>
> I was under the impression that high & low /e/, i.e. [e] and [E], were
> no
> longer phonemically distinct in contemporary French; and that similarly
> the
> high & low /ø/, i.e. [ø] and [|], were no longer phonemically
> distinct.
> But I may be wrong on this.  /o/ and /O/, I believe, are still
> separate
> phonemes.
>
> Maybe Christophe can enlighten us.
>
They are all phonemically distinct, i.e. French people can differentiate words
with them, although there are actually no minimal pairs for them (well, it's the
same with English /T/ and /D/, and still they are considered separate phonemes).
It's true that in the South of France, in the region of Saint-Etienne, they
speak a dialect of French where the low-mid and high-mid vowels have completely
merged, leaving only low-mid ones. Still, it gives to their speech a distinct
flavour immediately recognizable by any other French person, and everyone is
able to explain nearly as well as a specialist what is the difference between
the pronounciation of "peur" by a Stéphanois (/p2r/) and the pronounciation of
the same word by someone else (/p9r/). This is different from /a/ and /A/ for
instance, which have truly merged, except for some people, used to talk with a
potato in the mouth :) . Although there used to be minimal pairs differentiating
them (the most well known being patte /pat/: (animal) leg, pâtes /pAt/: pasta)
this distinction has been completely lost and most people cannot recognize the
different sounds anymore (in the North it's different, /A/ has gone to /Q/ and
thus is still phonemically different from /a/).

But as a whole, though the low-mid and high-mid vowels are phonemically
distinct, I don't think there's a need to write them differently, since without
minimal pairs there's no risk for confusion. Occam's Razor here.

Well, actually I found a minimal pair for /o/-/O/: heaume-homme. Maybe there are
some for the other ones too then...

> I would be very tempted to follow the same spelling conventions as
> Breton, i.e.
> {i} = /i/
> {e} = /e/
> {a} = /a/
> {o} = /o/
> {ou} = /u/
> {eu} = /ø/
> {u} = /y/
>
Pretty much the same as in French, if you disregard the diacritics and some
strange di- and trigraphs :) .

> I await clarification on the phonemic status of high & low mid-vowels
> in
> contemporary French before elaborating further.
>
Now that I really think about it, many people still have a phonemic distinction
between /e/ and /E/ at the end of some words, i.e. words ending in -é are
pronounced /e/, while words ending in -et have it pronounced /E/, that's to say
/E/ in an open syllable. I don't have it personnally. The problem of the
phonemicity of high and low mid-vowels in French is definitely a tricky one.

>
> Another problem - which Oskar may have addressed; I missed his initial
> mailing - are final consonants; e.g. _aout_ (August) is normally
> pronounced
> /ut/, with final /t/, in contemporary French, but loses its final /t/
> in
> the compound _mi-aout_ /miu/ (Mid-August, the feast of the Assumption
> [Aug.
> 15th]).   Similarly while _Christ_ is /krist/, once it is compounded
> the
> final consonants go, thus: _Jésus-Christ_ /jezykri/.   There are other
> examples which I don't recall off-hand.
>
I pronounce /miut/ personnally (but there are also people saying /aut/ or /au/,
and it seems to be more idiolectical than dialectical, so...), but I agree with
the second example. I think for the sake of the phenomenon of liaison and the
keep related words related, we have to cope with a certain amount of so-called
silent letters (which are not silent in every context anyway).

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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