From: Arnaud Fournet
Message: 61135
Date: 2008-10-31
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rick McCallister" <gabaroo6958@...>
>
> That's a crock of pure bolshevik.
> Spanish writes /w/ as <CuV>, generally as <guV>
> or <huV>
> French has <oui> /wi/
> ===========
> No,
> as regards French
> oui is a vocalic diphtongue [ui]
> as is shown from the fact
> that the homophone word ouie makes "liaison"
> such as les Z-ouies with Z in plural
> something that is impossible with a consonant initial.
> The fact that it sounds like [wi] is irrelevant
> from the point of view of French phonology,
> [wi] is a vocalic diphtongue /ui/
> and there is no /w/ phoneme.
> [w] is a "sound" not a phoneme.
> In slow "spelling" speech, oui is /u/+/i/ not
> **/wi/.
Phonetics is all about sound, you're talking about convention. If French
<oui> sounds like English <we>, then <ouV> and <wV> are the same sound
--at least until someone shows me otherwise
==========
They may sound superficially about the same,
but from the French point of view [wi] is just fast speech for /ui/ a
vocalic diphthongue with accent of the last part.
As a matter of fact, u in /ui/ or /ua/ can be changed for other vowels o
(somewhat provincial) and ö : a very absurd and effeminate way invented by
some caricaturists that make moi "me" sounds like [möa].
One of the candidates to the presidency has been caricatured this way.
This only makes it even clearer that the segment /u/ in oui and moi is
vocalic and has nothing to do with w. Möa is understandable as a queer
variant of [mua] "moi" but [mva] is a non French combination.
A
========
Liaison is a convention and the liaison of oui is rooted in another time
when it was pronounced /ui/.
====
No,
Liaison is alive in real speech
and what liaisons are possible indicates what the status of initials is.
And I suppose oui used to be /oi/ not /ui/ from hoc-illus > o-i > oui
========
But if I went down the streets of Paris saying /ui/ instead of /wi/,
wouldn't people give me some strange stares? Or at least more stares than
they usually give Americans butchering their language?
=============
/wi/ does not exist in French,
as I told you.
A.
>
> I suppose a native speaker of English would never spell
> week as oo-eek in
> two syllables,
> but ouie is spelled this way : ou-i(e) two syllables.
>
> This is not true in Northern French
> where wagon is /wagoN/
> and **les Z-wagons is impossible.
> and wagon would not be spelled ou-a-gon.
> You can contrast it with les Z-oies /ua/
> standard French is les /V/agons with /v/ instead of /w/.
>
> and I guess the same is true in Spanish.
> huevos in plural probably syllabicates as lo-swe-vos
> not like los-we-vos
> but I'm not a speaker of Spanish so I let you say how
> it works.
>
> This has nothing to do with bolshevism,
> I'm afraid your phonological approach is a bit
> superficial and tainted by
> the fact you are a native speaker of a language where /w/
> is a phoneme.
>
> Arnaud
In Spanish, it's definitely /lo-swe-Bos/ or /lo-hwe-Bo/
but you do have variations such as
un huevo as /uN-we-Bo/ (with velar n) vs / u-nwe-Bo/
of course, not everyone uses velar N
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