Re: OT: pronunciation question

MR = Mark Reed (me)
RV = Remi Villatel

MR>  It is spelled "Ghyslain", and from what little I know
MR> of French orthography I would guess it is pronounced as CXS
MR> [giz'l&~]

> I'd rather say [ZislE~]
Merci beaucoups!

> where [E~] represents the sound you can found in
> french words like "fin" [fE~], "brun" [bRE~], "vain" [vE~], "vingt" [vE~] or
> "à-jeun" [&:jE~]. (That's all the orthographies for [E~].)
That would be the sound I meant to indicate with [&~] (which is what
it sounds like to me when I hear French).  The other differences
are because I thought that (1) the <h> would keep the <g> as /g/
instead of /Z/, as it does in Italian, and (2) the <s> would
vocalize to /z/ between a vowel and a voiced sonorant.

> The official IPA char for [E~] is Epsilon (U+025b) with a tilde over it.
Right.  X-SAMPA/CXS [E~] is a direct transliteration of the IPA, and
[E] means epsilon and [~] is the tilde diacritic (which may be made
more explicit via the usual X-SAMPA diacritic indicator _, as in
[E_~], but there's no need in this case because there's no non-diacritic
tilde).

> In France Ghislain (with an "i") and its feminine form Ghislaine [ZislEn]
> are quite old-fashioned. But the Canadians and the Quebecers like to keep
> alive some french traditions. I guess they pronounce it with an american
> accent: [dZIsleIn].
Perhaps in English, but while the accent French Canadians have in
French is by definition "American", I'm pretty sure they don't Anglicize it
the way we United Statesians are prone to do. :)

Thanks again for the help.

-Mark