Re: A break in the evils of English (or, Sturnan is beautiful)

Christophe partage:

>En réponse à "Douglas Koller, Latin & French" <latinfrench@...>:
>
>  > The only words I can think of off the top of my head are "pleine"
>>  (/plEn/) (full, fem.) and "reine" (/REn/) (queen, fem.), and even
>>  then there's a mitigating final "e" as these are both feminine, else
>>  we'd get "plein" (/plE~/) (full, masc.) and "rein" (/RE~/) (kidney,
>  > masc.). Is it all *that* common? :)
>
>Extremely common! As common as the digraph |ai| for the same sound. Let me
>think... on top of my head, I have: veine, peine, déveine, neige, geignant,
>haleine, Seine, feignant, beignet, meilleur, peigne, seize. The fact that |ai|
>is used for the imperfect endings makes it look more common, but in radicals
>they are used both often. At least often enough to have to learn it at school
>along with the digraph |ai|.
*Fun* examples that I should've been able to come up with. You're the
native speaker and you learned it in school that way. Still, I plead
mitigation. veine, peine, déveine, haleine, and Seine (plus my own
pleine and reine) all have "-ne" at the end. neige and seize both end
in "-e". And geignant, feignant, beignet, and peigne all have the
"-gn-" thing going on (as with my examples going to /E~/ when they're
masculine, the participles geignant and feignant revert to /E~/ in
infinitive form: geindre /ZE~ndR/; feindre /fE~ndR/).
Meilleur seems different to me somehow, like soleil, vieille, pareil,
etc. where there's /Ej/ action going on.

More to my point, and I'm not a native, but I would think that if you
showed the average Jacques in the street

ai

è   or

ê

and asked how to pronounce them, you'd be pretty likely to elicit an
/E/, whereas

ei

would either get you head-scratching or /Ej/. (but I'M NOT A NATIVE!)

Kou

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