[tied] Re: 'Intrusive' phonemes in languages

From: tegnalos
Message: 39947
Date: 2005-09-12

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, glen gordon <glengordon01@...>
wrote:
>
> Tegnalos:
> > Sorry, but this is wrong, "quatres" does not exist
> > in French.
>
> Google France (http://www.google.fr) shows that there
> are **5 million** webpages showing the sequence
> "quatres heures". There are 739,000 webpages showing
> "quatres" with other plural nouns.
>
> Check it out yourself. Do your homework for once.
>


I don't need to do any homework... I'm Spanish, my mother tongue is
Spanish, and I know pretty well what I'm talking about. French is a
language close enough for any educated Spaniard to see something
weird in "quatres, cinqs" etc. It doesn't make sense in the logic of
Romance languages. The problem is that many French write phonetically
rather than ortographically, and that leads them to make many
shameful spelling mistakes.

About the titles of the books you mention, as Miguel Carrasquer
points out, if you click on the link you will see that the covers
show the correct title. 5 million web pages (now including Cybalist)
won't turn "quatres" in a normative standard nor even in a correct
form.

Interestingly enough, I guess, the travel to amazon.fr also provides
an example of how easy is for a French to make a mistake such as "Les
neufs vies". In the blue box at the right, you can see "4 neufs à
partir de". "Neufs", obviously, is not a numeral, but an adjective;
more concretely, it's the adjective "neuf" (new). So, the meaning
is "4 new books from". The problem, as I've already pointed, is
that "neufs" and "neuf" sound the same.