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

From:Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>
Date:Saturday, July 17, 2004, 5:50
--- Tristan Mc Leay <kesuari@...> wrote:
> > French journos aren't illiterate. They're just > French.
Perhaps "illiterate" isn't the right term. But I very much would like somebody to explain me why, even after having spent some weeks, on months, on the spot, a French reporter or journalist is unable to pronounce 'Srebrenica' or 'Ludwigshafen' or whatever looking a little bit exotic. And why the most respected French newspaper, "Le Monde", is unable to write correctly "Vesteraalen" (I also write it uncorrectly here, but I know it, and I'm not "Le Monde") in a big title for a full page article about... Vesteraalen Islands. In France, there is a real culture of "we pronounce the right way, foreigners don't". The mere idea of something like a stress (accent tonique) not working like in French seems to us utterly ridiculous. Somebody trying to stress a foreign word like a native will almost surely raise laughter and sarcasm around. I believe journalists, or reporters, working on international themes should know something about local pronunciation, or at least learn it while they work on it. French ones will never learn. "They have ears and they don't hear". And of course, if they pronounce Srebrenica like they do on TV news, millions of French people will think "oh, he must know, that's the way it should be pronounced". People sometimes tell me that my English pronunciation is good. Why is it so ? Because I didn't learn English at school (I was learning German at the time), but with tapes recorded by English natives. What's funny is that even the French pronouncing English the "French" way sometimes tell me that, so that means that they know that their pronunciation is not too good, and they have an idea of how it should be, but they just feel sort of ashamed of pronouncing not-the-French-way. There is a national psychological problem in there, that's for sure. (Also typical, the fact that, once they have learned some English, French people assume that all other languages in the world should more or less conform to the same rules. In fact, they seem to think that there are two kinds of people in the world: the French, and the others. That's why they will pronounce the German "w" just like the English, since both Germans and English are foreigners. There is an expression about that: "il parle en étranger" (he's talking foreign). Everything that is not French is foreign, and further distinctions are of little interest.) ===== Philippe Caquant "High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs) __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Vote for the stars of Yahoo!'s next ad campaign! http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/yahoo/votelifeengine/

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Tristan Mc Leay <kesuari@...>