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Re: How to Make Chicken Cacciatore (was: phonetics by guesswork)

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Sunday, July 18, 2004, 18:32
En réponse à Christian Thalmann :


>"Oeil" is [9j].
Yep, and the "l" is part of the tetragraph. The full "oeil" is [9j]. Basically "oe" and "eu" are pronounced the same in French, and thus "oeil" and "euil" too :) . Note that "oeil" [9j] is a funny word in that its plural is "yeux" [j2] ;)) .
> I never quite noticed that French people >use that for German "eu", but it makes sense.
That's not the description my Teach Yourself German gives. It fives "pseudo-phonetic" descriptions using French orthography and bold letters to indicate the main part of a diphtongue (indicating that the second part mustn't be pronounced like a full vowel). It invents letters for sounds not existing in French and that cannot be approximated nicely. [x] is thus represented as "r with dot below" and [C] as "ch with dot below h". Long vowels are represented with an arrow under them :) . All this to say that the way German "eu" was described was using the combination "oeu" with a bold "o". I always understood it to mean [O9], with 9 being an offglide. And hearing German spoken only confirmed my view :) .
>The High German realization of the diphthong seems more like >[OH] or [O9] to me.
So it seems My particular book (l'allemand en 90 leçons et en 90 jours) was quite correct (using only the book, I once reached a point where I couldn't utter a single sentence, but could understand people speaking Germans to each other without much difficulty. Quite a feat, knowing I bought the book without tapes :) ). It's one of those cases where a comparison works, because French and German sounds are often quite comparable, and the comparison didn't include sounds that didn't exist in German (I had to find some outside help to learn them. Had I bought the tape too, I wouldn't have had too :) ). Christophe Grandsire. http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.

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Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>