Re: French phonetics

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Petr Hrubis <petr.hrubis@...> wrote:

>
> > 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),

I think Piotr mentioned that. Does that cause a parsing problem, so to
speak, when you or another standard-Czech speaker tries to decode it?

BTW, it doesn't seem to be the stress pattern in the language in the
librettos of Janác^ek's operas, as far as I cant tell?

> 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]).

I am pleased to learn that Czech has loans from Danish ('fodbold') ;-)
You should hear Finns say Kókakola.

Btw, one of the first things I noticed in Prague was posters for a
movie in which the protagonist was played by some Audrey Hepburnová.


Torsten