Re: OT: Slightly OT: French as a second language

>I've always thought it was an American name misused by French people (we
>get more and more children with American names mispronounced in a French
>way. I call it the "soap-opera effect" :)) ).
LOL... yeah, that's kind of what I thought, too... It's my mom's name, and
she's claiming it's French for "beloved"... it looks KINDA like it... but
not enough, I don't think...

>You must have problems with the front rounded high vowel, /y/ in SAMPA
>and IPA. Most English speaking people can put their tongue around it :) .
>Just try to pronounce an /i/ like in 'see', but make a round with your
>lips, like if you pronounced the vowel in 'foot' (I think).
>
>Christophe.
Hey, it worked! :) Thanks. :)

>Tell me about it!  It's the same with English, and even weirder, because
>English has only the most tenuous connection to Latin -- French is at
>least a Romance language, albeit the most non-Latinate of them all.  So
>you have weird non-rules in English that come from mistaking it for Latin
>-- things like, "never split an infinitive."  There is absolutely no
>reason to forbid splitting an infinitive; sometimes it feels very natural
>and right to do so.  But Latin doesn't (can't) do it, so we're not
>allowed?  Oi.  I could go off on this for a good long time; once you
teach
>English for a living, you start to realize how backward our descriptive
>grammars really are.
Hehe.. so it's not only me! ;) I never really got that either... that and
"never end a sentence with a preposition". I will if I want to. ;)

>We used to have that sound in English, actually.  Died out with Middle
>English.  A pity, beccause I've always liked it.
Really? How do people know this stuff? That'd be cool if it were still
around.

>It's not quite like the vowel in "foot," to my untrained ear.  More like
>slurring together the y and the vowel in "you" so that it's one sound.
Of
>course, you could also try the "make an /i/ and purse your lips," which
>works for some people -- although my Old English prof used to do it over
>and over, never telling us what she was doing, until one guy finally
said,
>in frustration, "Okay, so you make the eeee sound and then make a funny
>face."  She blinked at him a couple times.  "Right," she said, giving up.
>:)
LOL.... That's funny. :)

>Well, French teaching is so much oriented towards the written material
>that French grammars pretend that spoken French is identical to written
>French.
Hehe... that's funny because it makes no sense. ;) Kinda like saying the
same for English (only English spelling is much worse).

>So according to those prescriptivists grammars, we would use the simple
>past when talking about past events (but the simple past is simply and
>completely dead in spoken French. We use the compound past instead),
Why is that? I mean, what's the difference between the two? Did/do they
have any different meaning?

>the conjugation of verbs consists entirely of suffixes, most verbs having
>five to six different endings at nearly every tense (well, it's true in
>written French, but in spoken French they have nearly completely
>disappeared, and the conjugation relies heavily on prefixes that the
>written language persists in considering them as separate pronouns. They
>are not! It's impossible to use "je" or "tu" except in front of a verb -
>the separate forms are "moi" and "toi" -),
Hehe... the endings confuse a lot of people in my class... they're
confused that you don't pronounce a lot of them...

>the plural is marked by an ending on the nouns (totally false in spoken
>French where most nouns sound exactly the same in singular and plural.
>Only the form of the article gives the number in this case),
Another tough one for some people (not me, though.... ;) )

>and 'ne' is mandatory to make negative sentences! (except that in spoken
>French, 'ne' has already disappeared for a long time now).
Really?! I didn't know that....

>In fact, the situation in France is mostly the same as in Imperial Rome:
>there is a written language about which all grammars talk about, and
>which is supposed to be the norm, but has nothing to do with the spoken
>language, which schools seem to completely disregard, despite the fact
>that everyone, including the teachers, use it!!!
>
>And I'm not talking about the fact that all schools teach an identical
>French, whether it is in Paris, in Marseille or in Guadeloupe!
>(...)
>Christophe.
Hmm... not sure what they do for that in the US, since I've only lived in
one part of it (one state, actually...sad)... seems to me most of the
dialects in the US have only minor differences, anyway...

>It's not really Sephardic (although "Sephardic" itself only refers to a
>category of related accents, and not to one specific pronounciation, just
>as "Ashkenazic" does) - Israeli is sort of pidgin-esque in that it takes
>the common denominators of Ashkenazic and Sephardic accents, and avoids
>using pronounciations that are distinctive or 'hard' for members of the
>other accent-groups.  That's why it has no emphatics or pharyngeals
>(because Ashkenazim can't pronounce them) and only around 6 vowel
>distinctions instead of around 10 (because Sephardim can't pronounce
>them).
>
>-Stephen (Steg)
Ah... I don't really know a lot about Hebrew... just that I read somewhere
that the dialect in Israel is Sephardic... but yeah, it would make more
sense that it's sort of a mix, since it's a nation of immigrants...


> "bunnies, bunnies it must be bunnies!"
LOL... what's with that? ;)

=====
The Aquamarine Demon
Gesám ayi mozuká. Gesám dohíng mozuká. Gesám adohíng mozuká!

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