En réponse à Tristan <kesuari@...>:
>
> Hey! We have cardinal vowels: [i] (unstressed), [u] *and* [u:] (before
> /l/), [e], [o]. All pretty cardinal
Yeah, but you speak walk-on-your-head English. Approximately 1 billion people
don't care about your pronunciation and have learned to speak an English which
doesn't have those cardinal vowels ;)) .
(I don't know how exactly
> cardinal,
> but I doubt there's any language with perfectly cardinal vowels). It's
> hardly my fault if we were a bit more adventurous with what we did
> with
> open vowels... And not only have we short *and* long vowels, but we
> also
> have diphthongs! Beat that!
Easy :)) .
(Note: nasal vowels don't trump
> diphthongs.
Of course they do! Diphtongues... how vain... ;)))
>
> What, you want us to choke on our Rs?
If you pronounce them correctly uvular, there won't be a problem (or else you
have a very curious throat configuration ;)) ).
If you want to kill yourselves,
> that's fine, just don't ask us to join in (death by R).
Well, the French population is still growing, so it seems we get along very well
with our Rs (the Germans seem happy too ;)) ).
And use a
> *rhotic* for a *syllable nucleus*???
Where did you see a syllable nucleus? I never wrote /R=/! "Alexandre" is *three*
syllables, not four! The ending /dR/ is a coda consonant cluster, not a separate
syllable!!!!
You've got to be crazy!
It's you who are crazy if you attempt to pronounce French with Rs as syllable
nuclei! That just never happens! :))
If /@/
> was
> good enough for my father, it's good enough for me!
How conservative ;)))) .
You French people
> need to learn how to talk properly.
>
You rather need to listen to us properly ;))) . Anyway, the world knows very
well that the only language spoken properly is French, and that all the others
are variations thereof ;)))) .
> And anyway, pronouncing the words Frenchly wouldn't've helped any.
> Speaking French, maybe, but who's going to do that in a world where
> English is the dominant language?
The currently growing group of anti-Americans? ;)))))
You should've worked harder to have
> Anglo-Norman continue. <-- conlang idea! Anglo-Norman becomes the
> dominant language in England, but suffers all the same changes that
> English did from that time onwards. Something to make Christophe
> cringe!
> French spoken and written as if it were English!
>
LOL! Being a Normand, I can tell you that the "pure" Normand language is quite
like that (we have quite a few diphtongues that didn't come around in standard
French :))) ).
>
> One thing I've always wondered is why those things are called verbs. I
> mean, sure a few of them inflect (do, be, have---but half the time,
> the
> latter two at least are clitics) but most of them are as uninflectable
> as 'in'. Just an historical oddity because they come from verbs?
>
Indeed. The fact that they still have past tense helps consider them verbs too
(even if the past tense of those words quickly loses its tense value). Anyway,
in Amia, the auxiliaries did conjugate ;)) .
>
> Oh, well that's boring... I simply haven't been paying attention to
> everything...
>
A cardinal sin I'd say! You should be ashamed of yourself! ;))))
Christophe.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.