Re: French spelling scheme

At 12:49 pm +0200 2/5/01, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>En réponse à Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>:
[snip]

>Indeed. That's why I like French orthography. I think it is already the
>optimum
>when you want to agree (b) and (c) together.
Near optimum, I'd say - one could do a bit of fine-tuning. I remember as a
school boy being a bit put out when I found that "j'ai eu" is /Zey/ and not
/Zeø/ as the spelling suggests   :)

>>
>> 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).
The anology with /T/ and /D/ is interesting. In fact many (probably most)
of my fellow country do not realize they are two different phonemes until
it's pointed out to them.  But it has observed here when English spelling
reforms have been discussed that one could well keep the same symbol for
both sounds.  Actually, there is one pair of words where the two sounds are
clearly phonemic: _thy_ /Daj/ ~ _thigh_ /Taj/.

What I was thinking of was, e.g. that in _treize_ we have the low-e /trEz/
- Is /trez/ even a theoretical possibility or would the sound always be low
in a final syllable before /z/?

>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.
I wasn't thinking of this.  I don't mean that the two phones have fallen
together, but that [E] and [e] are in complementary distribution.  But now
I think about it, I'm not so sure.  _bête_ is /bEt/, but could *béte /bet/
in theory be a possible word.

[snip]
>....................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
Yes, I knew this.  I gather this has happened over the past half century or so.

>(in the North it's different, /A/ has gone to /Q/ and
>thus is still phonemically different from /a/).
Interesting - I did not know that (my daughter-in-law comes from mid-France :)

When you say 'north', how far north?  Does this include Parisian
pronunciation or are were getting up into Picardy where, I guess, influence
of Patois might make a difference?

>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.
I think this is generally so with the front vowels, but....

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

>> 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 :) .
Not surprising - French orthography has clearly influenced Breton
orthography.  But the Bretons are a little more consistent, e.g. /e/ is
always written {e} and not, for variation, as {ai}   :)

[snip]
>
>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.
Right - we were taught 50 years ago that _était_ is /etE/ but _été_ is
/ete/; but I thought the distinction had been lost now.  I guess some
francophones still observe it.

>The problem of the
>phonemicity of high and low mid-vowels in French is definitely a tricky one.
That's what I thought.

>> 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
Influence of /ut/   :)

Jacques Guy assured me he says /ut/ but /miu/, and my daughter-in-law
agreed with this, so it seems that some people who normally pronounce
_aout_ with final /t/, do not do so when it is compounded.

>(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.
..and IIRC both land-lubbers & sailors pronounce _est_ (east) as /Est/, but
only land-lubbers keep the final consonants in _nord-est_ which sailors
pronounce /nOrE/.

But this pronouncing & dropping of final consonants is a different
phenomenon from......

>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).
I agree.   Tho I could never understand why you have to write silent
letters which are silent in _all_ contexts, e.g. the final -p in _trop_
and, very misleading to a young schoolboy, the final -t in _et_ (and)!

Ray.

=========================================
A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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