Re: E and e

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@F...> wrote:

 > Strange that you have [seziR] but [EmA~]. I would have understood
that you
 > would close all /E/ in open vowels into [e], but what you have is just
 > strange :)) . I have [sEziR] and [Ema~].

That's why I insisted on a front vowel following.



 > > (I guess it would not be helpful if I mentioned that the
 > > Robert agrees with me on this. ;-)
 > >
 >
 > On the pronunciation of "gréviste" and "sévérité"? Of course! I agree
with you
 > too :)) . But it's a phone*m*ic alternation, very well-known, that words
 > like "aimer" don't have.

I'm afraid the Robert also agrees with me on all
the examples of "ai" that I quoted in my previous
post.  =P  Seems like the Romands have stayed truer
to "official" French than the French.  =)  (Unless
you were to count things like "septante", "oussi",
"envoir" (for "au revoir") or "qui c'est qui",
which my mother uses... {I don't.})

I guess if you're going to use accents anyway, you
might as well choose the one that matches the
pronunciation, thus è -> é.  Changing ai -> é
would be a harsher intrusion though, which might
be why it's not done in Academic French.

Does Academic French represent an older stage in
the development of the language, or simply a
dialect that was made official?  In the former
case, it would seem as if the contemporary French
were "retro-engineered" to fit the orthography,
since è is treated differently from ai, although
they both represent /E/.  IIRC, linguistic
evolution isn't supposed to be aware of notation.



-- Christian Thalmann

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