CHAT: French pronunciation

John Cowan eskrïremä:

> Daniel Seriff scripsit:
>
> > I discovered last summer that this is only really true in Paris and
> > thereabouts. My ex-girlfriend and I were in Aix-en-Provence, and we were
> > treated substantially better there than Paris in relation to our
> > French-speaking attempts.
>
> Maybe this has to do with the fact that French was a learned-language
> in Provence until the 1900s?
Well, I found when I was in Alsace that any attempt on my part to speak
French was welcomed. However, those who could tell that their English was
better than my faltering French tended to put me out of my misery and switch
to English after a few sentences. They could tell I was English, obviously,
although I got the feeling that the ratio of German tourists there to
English tourists was about 99:1. We only saw one other UK-registered car
there in a whole week.

When I spoke to some German tourists there in Alsace, after a few minutes
chatting in broken German one of them asked, "... aber du bist Französisch,
oder?" ("... but you're French, right?") I've wondered ever since if I speak
German with a French accent.

James

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james@zolid.com  James Campbell  Zeugma--Our Life Is Design  www.zolid.com
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