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

On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 23:09:00 +0200, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
wrote:
> Quoting Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>:
>> And what could be "indeterminacy in French vowels" ?
>> I'm French and just cannot understand what it is
>> about. If there was an example, perhaps I could.
>
> From the mouth of the horse, or at least from the text of the original
> X-SAMPA proposal:
>
> "In deference to the requirements of those working on French, SAMPA has
> defined a special role for the forward slash, / (ASCII 47), namely as a
> markerof certain vowel archiphonemes or indeterminacies, e.g. maison
> /mE/zO~/. It is of course also widely used as a delimiter of phonemic
> transcriptions."
>
> I don't feel appreciably wiser, but then I don't know French (despite
> what my sister would tell you!).
It means that there are words in which it is not easy to determine whether
the underlying phoneme for some speakers is /e/ or /E/.  French SAMPA uses
this notation (which is what the X-SAMPA proposal is referring to) and it
is described there:  http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/french.htm

To save you clicking if you're not interested:

   << When they are functional, the load of the oppositions a-A, e~-9~, e-E,
      o-O, 2-9 may be very low for certain speakers, and there is a tendency
      towards neutralisation. When they are not functional there is a strong
      tendency in unstressed syllables towards indetermination.
"Indeterminacy"
      symbols have been agreed to cover occurrences of these phonemes or
sounds:

	E/= e or E
	A/= a or A
	&/= 2 or 9
	O/= o or O
	U~/= e~ or 9~
    >>


	*Muke!
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