Re: French reform (Re: C.Thalmann, & #1)

Jean-François Colson wrote:

>On Wednesday, April 13, 2005 1:15 PM, J. 'Mach' Wust wrote:
>
>>The weak schwa vowel is not transcribed because its occurence is
>>predictable.
>
>Not always. For example pneu is pronounced /pn2/, but many people
>erroneously add a schwa: /p@n2/
>
>>If required (in poetry), it may be transcribed as if it were /9/.
>
>It's true that /9/ and /@/ tend to merge in present French, but there are
>still dialects where they are different phonemes. I have the feeling that
>merging /2/ and /9/ would be less problematic, but that's perhaps because
>they are often written with the same digraph: |eu|.
For me, it is more plausible to write /2/ and /9/ with the same phoneme
considering they are phonemicly the same

But in my dialect, /9/ and /@/ are never merged, mixed, changes, confused or
something else.

The first times I've heard it, I've took a long time to understand what was
the link between "femme" and "meuf" in Verlan before tinking that some may
pronounce "femme" as /fam9/ instead of /fam/ or at least /fam@/. In fact
Verlan isn't used around here and hearing it is only possible in french
movies: lot of people has never been awared of it.

To get back to the subject, I don't think I've ever heard "pneu" pronounced
/p@n2/, or maybe in some jokes by some humorist that was imitating an
accent..

But I also think that /@/ needs it's own phoneme because if there are really
two following consonants like /bR/ or /dw/, how do one know if there's a
schwa or not? or if there are 3 consonants and that there's a schwa between
two of them, how might one know between which? I can't think of an example
where putting a schwa or not might change the meaning but there are probably
some.

- Max