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Re: YAEPT alert! [Re: Not phonetic but ___???]

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Saturday, April 17, 2004, 21:21
En réponse à Mark J. Reed :


>Incidentally, to my non-native-French ear it seems that the closest French >vowel to [U] is the one in "oeuf".
Really? "oeuf" is [9f], i.e. the vowel is the rounded version of [E]. I would have thought you would compare [U] rather with [u] and [o] than with [9]. The distance with that one looks rather far... And to my French ear, [U] sounds nothing like [9]. As Philippe showed very well, we confuse it rather with [u]. To Philippe: you see, a native speaker think [U] is closer to the vowel in "oeuf" than the vowel in "coup". So for the native speaker, the difference between [u] and [U] is just as big as the difference between [u] and [9] is for us. _________________________________________________________________________ En réponse à Philippe Caquant :
>Can't understand that point about "cure". I always >pronounced it something like "kju:r", and my Harraps's >says someting similar. What has it to do with a nurse >?
If you had truly read what Trebor wrote, you would have seen how he pronounces "cure": [kjr\=]. No [u] in there! And probably he pronounces "nurse" as [nr\=s] or something similar, so in his speech "cure" and "nurse" are assonant (i.e. they have the same vowel. Note that [r\=] is vocalic). That's what it has to do with "nurse". And stop hiding behind this dictionary. The Harrap's only presents word pronunciation in the "British Received Pronunciation", a sort of neutral British flavour which has an existence only in the mouth of teachers teaching English to non-English speakers. It doesn't say anything about the English spoken by most native speakers. Remember one thing: English *doesn't* have an Academy, it *doesn't* have a hierarchy of dialects, it *doesn't* have a standard form. It doesn't even have a majority dialect! English is a jigsaw puzzle, with each piece being a dialect, and no piece is much bigger than the other. So your dictionary doesn't describe a "better" version of English, nor a "standard". It just describes a variant of British English that is commonly taught to foreigners. This variant is not majoritary, and not standard. _________________________________________________________________________ En réponse à Roger Mills :
>But another large segment of the population has unrounded and centralized >the vowel to a schwa (actually [3^] or [3:] depending on rhoticity), and >rhymes this word with _her, fur, burr, nurse_ etc.
Philippe has difficulties realising that English is not structured like French, with a standard dialect enforced by school and under control of the Academy (and forced on people with violence until not that long ago). He cannot really understand the variety of English dialects and the big differences they can have. And he doesn't get that dialects are not just accents (i.e. identical, except that some sounds are changed a bit, like Southern French has an alveolar trilled r, while Northern French has an uvular fricative r) but have differences up to the phonemic level, the morphological level, and the syntactic level. Centuries of centralised French education do that. But Philippe has to understand that the linguistic monolith that French is is an exception rather than the rule. Most languages, including all written ones, are no more than collections of reciprocally intelligible dialects, with *none* being truly standard.
>"Surely you've studied 'Hamlet'?" >"Don't call me Shirley!" >Ha ha groan
LOL. I think Philippe should get it now ;))) . The example was very good :)) . Christophe Grandsire. http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.

Replies

Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>
John Cowan <cowan@...>