From: Miguel Carrasquer
Message: 32256
Date: 2004-04-24
>Whatever. You're blowing it out your toothole because there's noUnlike the PDF you gave that made no distinction between
>such thing, you've avoided for the longest time to provide us with
>your holy Jacques quote and just like in the "alveolar French s"
>debate, the following Canadian university article contradicts you:
>
> http://www.ucalgary.ca/~dcwalker/PronCF.pdf
> Let us now turn to a process of lengthening which producesThe 3-way contrast is not systematic, and I never claimed it
> two allophones for each SF vowel (except /´/): a long and
> a short.
>
>Note how the author doesn't say "a long and a short and a double
>long"?
> As a final detail in the discussion of vowel length in SF,One is enough. If there's a contrastive pair, there are two
> we must mention a peripheral case where, in certain styles
> or with certain speakers, there remains a phonemic difference
> between long and short E - /E/ versus /E:/. This opposition
> may occur in a few pairs of words, such as those in (14),
> although not all speakers differentiate these forms
> consistently, and the difference is not marked in standard
> normative dictionaries
>
>THANK YOU! I win. This is just as I had reasoned. As I figured,
>this is a _rarer_ distinction if there is one at all, in "a few
>pairs of words" even.
>You can only claim that you're correct inYes, I know. But that's hardly relevant in a discussion
>a very, very, very specific sense. In general standard French,
>this is just not the norm.
>
>
>> Faut-il cependant révoquer la distinction classique entre
>> séries de brèves en "-ette" ou "-ète", "-èle" ou "-elle",
>> et séries de longues en "-ête" ou "-êle"? Olovsson suggère
>> même une gradation "frêle" ([E] long) -"d'aile" ([E]
>> demi-long) -"d'Elle" ([E] bref), [...]
>
>Ignoring Olovsson's crazy suggestion, what is being discussed
>here is a specific speech pattern in which "ê" is pronounced
>as [E:] (or I gather even [e:]) due to historical reasons,
>due to loss of former "s". This is an artifact that is mostly
>died out from many varieties of French.
>> Length contrast in French is on its way back (ca. 1900 therePay attention. ê is always /E/, never /e/, in standard
>> was still a distiction between ami /ami/ and amie /ami:/,
>> which has now been given up), but it certainly exists,
>> despite the fact that most French courses and dictionaries
>> pretend it doesn't exist (and most French people think it
>> doesn't exist, because they weren't taught it in school).
>
>... Or maybe it's all in Miguel's head. You can say that everyone
>including all Canadian universities are crazy or you can just admit
>that you need to know more about French.
>
>
>> I can certainly hear a distinction between <mettre>, <mètre>
>> and <maître> in Parisian French, so by definition it's
>> phonemic.
>
>Did you forget that I live in Canada? And even with Parisian
>French, I find what you say suspect. Either its a two-way
>contrast or there is a quality difference between [E] and [e].