Brian:
> Jacques Guy is a linguist whose native language is French.
> He also has an odd sense of humor and a bit of a chip on his
> shoulder, but he's quite knowledgeable, capable of making
> excellent sense when he chooses to be serious, and certainly
> perfectly capable of accurately reporting speech sounds.
Well honestly, no matter how ungifted one is at "accurately
reporting speech sounds", there's no chance in hell of getting
*/mE::tR/ out of "maître". This is just fluff linguistics without
substance. People don't talk like that in real life and for
someone "phoquing" his way through many a post on sci.lang, I
have trouble following.
> One of the things that came out of that discussion was that
> there is much local variation. Norman French, for instance,
> apparently has a larger vowel inventory than many other
> varieties. His Parisian wife does not distinguish <in> and
> <un> (though she does distinguish /a:/ in <Jacques> from /a/
> in <jatte>).
Yes, this is alright, but to say that French has double-long
vowels is proposterous and baseless. Sounds like someone making
up some absurd idea in order to write their thesis. Again, I've
honestly never heard anyone claim a distinction like that nor
pronounce that distinction. They are homophonous words, perhaps
sometimes with long vowel in some speech varieties but a three-way
contrast? Where in the world do francophones make such a
distinction.
And just to be clear, I'm talking about a PHONEMIC distinction of
three-way length contrasts as was the original topic. There is no
such thing.
I need hard facts here, not more of this pantomime.
What francophone pronounces "maitre" as /mE::tR/ and _how_ can it
be shown that this is the _phonemic_ condition??
= gLeN