Re: Harsh vs. Soft Sounds

En réponse à J Y S Czhang :


>     Any explanation(s) why this linguistic death happened????
>IIRC her accent was from poor rural French who moved into the poorer Paris
>precincts in the late 19th Century (or earlier). After WW2, their children -
>wishing to avoid being "rural outsiders" forever - assimilated into Parisian
>culture and current accents. [Quite similar to the "Okies" who moved to Los
>Angeles and San Francisco, California in the 1930's & '40's...]
Well, your explanation is basically correct. Having that accent was 
extremely negative in society (everybody else saw it as a debased and 
uneducated version of French), so it quickly disappeared, the children 
learning the more mainstream accent at school. The very centralist way 
French deals with language just accelerated the process.

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.