Re: OT: Another French name pronunciation question

On Wed, 4 Feb 2004 22:39:56 +0100, Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:
> En réponse à Muke Tever :
>
>> michael poxon <m.poxon@...> wrote (re "Niépce")
>>> To me the name looks vaguely Slavonic. Maybe an emigre from the East?
>>
>> Odd, from here it looks pretty clearly like a Romance word for "niece"
>> (L neptia), tho I'm not sure that'd see much use as a surname.
>
> In French it's "nièce" (where do you think you got the word from? :)) ).
> Indeed, "Niepce" could be an archaic spelling due to its use as last name
> (in which case I'd expect it to be pronounced [njEs]). But I'd still
> expect it to be written "Niepce" or "Nièpce". The acute accent doesn't
> belong there.
Perhaps there was a dialect that had E > [je].

(I thought old Ibran might have had this, but the word is only <nieuce>
[nj9tS@].)

And I have, I think, finally figured out the mnemonic behind SAMPA [2] and
[9] for the vowels behind them:  the X-SAMPA file lists Fr. <deux> and
<neuf> as examples.  Now, remembering which IPA symbol is which is still a
bit harder...



	*Muke!
--
http://frath.net/                  E jer savne zarjé mas ne
http://kohath.livejournal.com/     Se imné koone'f metha
http://kohath.deviantart.com/      Brissve mé kolé adâ.