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

At 23:30 18/05/00 -0400, you wrote:
>>
>That would be true, since French (and Spanish) back vowels are much more
>rounded than English, which in turn are more rounded than Japanese.  No
>doubt American failure to round sufficiently is one of the factors
>contributing to the French displeasure with American-spoken French-- along
>with our /r/, too much aspiration, nasalizing in all the wrong places,
>pronouncing all those silent letters, inability to handle _u, eu_ etc. or
>simple words like _feuille_or _fauteuil_..........
>
It also comes from the fact that we French are particularly intolerant in
the way foreigners speak our language. For us, you have only one
alternative: you speak French perfectly or you don't speak it at all. If
you don't speak it very well, you'd rather not try to talk in French
because people won't even try to understand you.

Of course, it's not that manichean, and someone with a fair knowledge of
French but a not so good pronunciation will be accepted. Also, the problem
is not that much a problem of intolerance. I happen to be very tolerant in
that respect. I know that French pronunciation is not that easy and thus I
accept mispronunciations without a problem. the problem is that to my ear,
when more than one or two sounds are wrong, the whole word becomes
gibberish to me, I can't understand it anymore. It happens quite often with
my Dutch boyfriend when he tries a few words in French. It usually takes me
ten times to understand what he meant, and when I finally understand it it
happens that his pronunciation was quite near to the correct one. Yet I
just couldn't understand! It generally annoys my friend very much, but I
cannot help it! I don't know where it comes from, maybe from the fact that
we don't have that many dialectical differences in French.

                                                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)