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French - separating spoken and written? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5435 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 9 of 14 25 January 2011 at 6:11am | IP Logged | ||||||||
This is correct. Most of the time there is an R sound, but it should be pointed out that in rapid colloquial speech and specifically in certain dialects, such as Québécois, consonant clusters, such as -ste and -tre, are phonetically reduced to -s and -t respectively. Thus quatre enfants could be heard as quat'enfants. Quatre sous becomes quat'sous and quatre saisons quat'saisons. In written French, these forms are commonly found in songs or names of businesses but not in standard written French. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6016 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 10 of 14 25 January 2011 at 9:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I am aware of this. I didn't say /s/, because I didn't mean it. When I say "an S phoneme" I mean "a phoneme that is habitually rendered as S in the orthography". I'm sorry if that wasn't clear. You automatically assumed I was wrong, rather than that you had misunderstood me. But I can't say I'm surprised.
Again, the S is not a morphological marker, it marks a phoneme that is realised silently except where liaison occurs. If it was not an intrinsic part of the word in the native speaker's model of the language, liaison would work very differently from what it does. Most phonemes are impossible to name unambiguously because phonemes are habitually realised in different ways. For example, the D in Peninsular Spanish. It can be a hard /d/ sound or it can be a soft TH-like sound. But it is one phoneme, and we call it D, because that's how it is written. The French phoneme I am talking about is realised in too ways: // (nothing) and /z/. If you don't want to call it S, that's fine, but just because I call it a different thing from you doesn't make me wrong. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Préposition Diglot Senior Member France aspectualpairs.wordp Joined 5119 days ago 186 posts - 283 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC1 Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Swedish, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 11 of 14 25 January 2011 at 10:18am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I wouldn't call it educated speech, it's just an effort made by people who want to be articulate to say "quatre" and pronounce the final "re". People would also say "quat'" in France, and you know what it means because it cannot mean anything else (or I've completely missed out on a synonym). It's a very common thing not to pronounce each and every word properly, and in Finistère, people tend to eat their words pretty badly, so "Brest" (city) becomes "Bress'", words ending in "ble" like "comptable" would become "comptap'" (not even a -b, haha), and many many more. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5435 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 12 of 14 25 January 2011 at 3:31pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
As I said, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I don't know what kind of training in elementary phonology is behind this confusion, but let me clarify a few issues for the benefit of the other readers who may be scratching their heads as I often do when I read these comments. Let me first point out that there are lots of excellent references about French phonology on the web. Here are a couple of good articles: http://www.wordiq.com/definition/French_phonology_and_orthog raphy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_phonology Very simply put, a phoneme is a distinctive unit of sound of a language. The word "distinctive" is very important here because it means that this particular sound is used to distinguish meaning in different words. The above articles give very unambiguous lists of the phonemes of French. By convention, phonemes are written between slashes, e.g. /b/. The phonemes in certain contexts can be pronounced somewhat differently. These different pronunciations of phonemes are called allophones. For example, the French /R/ can be rendered in a number of very different ways phonetically but it is still considered the same phoneme /R/. Allophones are written in square brackets, e,g, [ʀ] French has two different phonemes /s/ and /z/. Is there some other mysterious phoneme that has allophones [ø] (nothing) and [z]? I've never heard of one. The source of the confusion here is that there is some misunderstanding about the role of the final s in the word "ils". It is never pronounced as [s] and is not pronounced at all except in context of liaison with a following word that begins with a vowel. Most authors speak of a "latent consonant". In this case, a [z] sounds appears in situations like "ils ont". The subject of liaison is a whole issue in itself. The role of the s here has nothing to do with phonemes or allophones. It's a grammatical marker that is silent except for for certain contexts. It's a simple as that. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5278 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 13 of 14 25 January 2011 at 4:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I am grateful for all the input, but could we end the ego-inspired arguments on tangential topics and deal with this
in a casual format. Is it feasible to get an intro into a language purely with (meaningless?) audio for purposes of avoiding visual (i.e. written) inputs affecting what is heard and produced? Cainntear: the McGurk effect would suggest against what you are saying, i.e. it would support my argument. You need to be blinded to the visual cues in order to hear what is really going on. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5435 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 14 of 14 25 January 2011 at 5:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
It seems to me that you are making thing needlessly difficult for yourself. I don't seem any harm in looking at the written form while concentrating on learning the sounds of French. Quite the contrary, it's an excellent way of learning how to pronounce written French. Unlike English, the writing system of French is quite straight-forward. Once you've learned a few rules, reading French aloud is not that difficult. I really don't see the point of listening to meaningless input to develop accent when you can do the same thing with meaningful input and get the added advantage of actually learning how the language is used. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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