Re: French phonetics

> I think the problem is that in French, stress the only cue to the
> position of word boundaries (in Czech too?). Therefore, stressing

Well, more or less, yes.

> foreign words according to a separate pattern will disrupt the
> hearer's morpheme parsing. In the Germanic languages, except English,

Precisely. We do have another pattern in Northern Moravia, where
penultimate syllables are stressed (just like in Polish), but again,
you can either have only the initial stress, as in literary Czech, or
only the penultimate stress. No combination of or variation in the two
allowed. McDonald is pronounced ['mEkdOnalt] (although if we took it
according to the American pronunciation, ['mEkda:nlt] would be much
more precise - clearly, orthography also affects local pronunciation
of foreign words, just like in football, which is written /fotbal/
here and pronounced [fodbal]).

> there are at least two layers of foreign words, namely Latin and
> French, which are stressed according to their own rules; English tries
> to nativize those words, mostly by moving stress two syllables forward
> (to the syllable which had secondary stress in the source language and
> in English when it was first introduced there). Further, Germanic adds
> a laryngeal Knacklaut to initial vowels, which helps establish a
> boundary too.
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/25369
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/39973
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/33381
>
> But I guess you could trace the frustration Francesco expressed to a
> feeling caused by the perception that the French in their language
> will accept only one stress pattern, their native one, unlike the
> practice of many of their linguistic neighbors, much like their
> attitude in many other fields towards foreignness.

Oh, that's another thing, of course. Their attitude has often
be...well, not very pleasant I'm afraid. I must admit I haven't had
many opportunities to learn the opposite, though, so maybe just...bad
luck? :-)

Best,

Petr