Re: French pronunciation (Was: Re: Fw: [wika] Boreanesian)

At 00:48 21/05/00 -0400, you wrote:
>
>The Javanese, I think, tend toward the French attitude-- speak it well, or
>stick to Bah.Indonesia.  The added problem is that it's so easy to give
>offense in Javanese, by using a word of the wrong level.  Javanese friends
>told me that after BI was declared the official national language, they were
>relieved, because now they had a way to write home/deal with relatives etc.
>without having to be constantly aware of colloquial ~ respectful ~ high
>differences.
>
Is there anywhere on the WEB a grammar of Javanese? I'd like to see that.
Maybe I'd borrow such a system for Itakian :) .

>>Of course, it's not that manichean, and someone with a fair knowledge of
>>French but a not so good pronunciation will be accepted......It happens
>quite often with
>>my Dutch boyfriend when he tries a few words in French.
>    I trust you are learning Dutch, then?  ;-)
>
I do, indeed, but my boyfriend is still learning (slowly, but I'm also slow
to learn Dutch) French, and our communication language stays English (which
becomes more and more code-switching with French and Dutch :) ). My problem
with Dutch is not the language itself which is not very difficult (at least
for me) but the fact that each time I say something, my friend replies:
"Well, that's correct Dutch but we would never say it this way" :)) . Dutch
is full of difficulties like that (like the fact for instance that "very"
has three equivalents: "heel", "erg" and "zeer" and that it's impossible to
know which one is possible with which adjective, and which one is not), but
it makes it a very interesting language. And my friend says he really loves
the way I speak Dutch, because it's perfectly understandable but completely
different to the way a native Dutch would talk. I'd like to be able to
invent a language like that :) .

                                                Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://rainbow.conlang.org
(ou : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepages/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html)