Mark:
>French has voila. I would not be suprised if they have fw too.
Boy, you don't get down to Louisiana much, do you? Yes, French
has words like /fois/ "occurance, time" and /foie/ "liver".
I said earlier:
>As for the trw combo in trois, my hair stands on end. It's a different R, I
>think.
Actually, come to think of it, /trois/ is probably pronounced
"twa" by most average Anglophones and not /trwa/ like I do it.
>Since we're doing a bit of French, there's that town across the
>St. Larry from Montreal: Longueuil (where the Expo was, if I remember
>correctly). This is an *impossible* run of vowels for >English, or at
>least, us Etats-Uniques.
Erh, I thought you're from the United States, not the "The Unique
States". I think you mean "Etats-Unis" (or "Estados-Unidos" in
Spanish which will soon take over your puny English language...
ole!).
At any rate, in actuality, "Longueuil" is not one long string of
vowels. It's just pronounced [lo~go"j] in French which kinda sounds
like "Long-gooey" to English ears. There are reasons why this name
is spelled so funny.
First, the "u" after the "g" is there to keep the "g" from
automatically being pronounced "zh" before "e" or "i"
(palatalisation). To ensure a hard-g pronunciation, the word
must be written as "gu" with a silent "u" seen elsewhere like
/qui/ or /guide/. You see, French delabialized Latin /kW/ and
/gW/, hence silent "u".
Next, the "eu" is always used for the sound [o"], and here, it is
followed by "i", making it a simple diphthong [o"j].
That's not so hard to understand, is it? What I personally
don't understand is French names like /Ailx/ pronounced [aj], or
the last name /Ouelet/ which should be pronounced [wo"le] based
on the spelling but is actually pronounced [wo"let]. (????!) THAT'S
seriously messed up. I know "Ailx", at least, is the result of
clinging to Old French spellings. I have no clue about "Ouelet".
>My other bad is Anilouh and ennui: apparent homophones (Did I spell
>the playwright's name right?).
Actually, you're kinda wrong here.
Ennui is pronounced [a~'nyi] where "y" is a front-rounded semivowel
seen also in Mandarin words like /yue/ [ye]. The playwright's
name is Jean Anouilh and as far as I understand French spelling, it
is not exactly a homophone, but almost. One would pronounce /Anouilh/
as [an'wi] or [anu'i]. Since there is no distinction of [y] and
[u] in English, the two are perceived to homophones by Anglophones.
-------------------------------------------------
gLeNny gEe
...wEbDeVEr gOne bEsErK!
home:
http://glen_gordon.tripod.com
email:
glengordon01@...
-------------------------------------------------
>
>
>--- In cybalist@..., "Glen Gordon" <glengordon01@...> wrote:
> > Mark O:
> > >The point of this post is that there are lots of clear, distinct
> > >sounds a native-speaker of English can easily produce, but there
>are
> > >few or no words using these sounds. Bw/pw is another example.
> >
> > However, we *do* have sounds like /pw/ and /bw/ in English, via
> > words of French origin. Most people have heard of "menage a
> > trois" with the even stranger /trw/ combination in "trois".
> > Compared to that, /vw/ seems like "child's play" which is a
> > perfect segway to the next quote, I must say...
> >
> > >With small children, L and R often comes out as W (with wots of wip
> > >wounding). I wonder if this has acted as a contraint on such sounds
> > >arising.
> >
> > Due to the factus ad supra, methinks nej.
>
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