Re: Love Those Double Vowels (was: Diving In...)

In a message dated 11/6/01 4:16:53 AM, dbarr@ATTCANADA.CA writes:

>I speak a French somewhere between
>good-standard-with-a-slight-Canadian-accent and
>dear-god-what-forsaken-corner-of-the-bush-did-*that*-crawl-out-from Joual,
>depending on company and circumstance.
>
>Quebec French very definitely distinguishes /a/ and /A/. /A/ is often
>diphthongized in colloquial speech - "garage" in hard dialect sounds almost
>like /garAwZ/, a pathetic attempt at phonetics, by which I mean that the
>vowel in the last syllable is almost an "ow" sound like in "now" (though
>not
>quite). Sometimes in stressed environments where /A/ would be diphthongized,
>/a/ becomes /A/.  You'll often see transcriptions of speech, like dialogue
>in books, where they'll write stuff like "Canadâ," "çâ" and so on to show
>the pronunciation.
That's interesting, I'll have to get a book on Québecois phonology....

>I don't know the difference the dictionary means, but as I say them slowly,
>words like "fleur" and "bleu" don't have the same vowel - "fleur" is more
>open. Christophe?
>
>Of course, Québecois is a dialect that pronounces "tu vas" as /tsu vA/,
>"je
>suis" as /Syi/ or even just /Sy/ - "chuis" or "chus" or "j'su'" in
>transcription - and mashes "je vais" into "m'as" /mA/ before another verb,
>e.g. "je vais te dire quelque chose" "I'm going to tell you something"
>comes
>out /mA t@ dzi:(r) ketSoz/. Terrifying. <grin>
That *is* terrifying. :-0 Where do they get "m'as" from? Is it from "you have
me" or something else? "You have me to tell you sothing." <shuddering>
And wouldn't "tu vas" be /tsy vA/ rather than /tsu vA/? At least it would
have to be a front vowel for the /t/ to become an affricate. Of course they
could have switched the vowel afterwards, who knows.

>Doug
Josh Roth
http://members.aol.com/fuscian/eloshtan.html

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