Talk:French pronunciation

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Perhaps it should also be noted that the stress in French words always falls on the last syllable. Unless the last syllable contains a schwa. In that case, the stress will fall on the penultimate syllable.

For example:

PARLER

je parle tu parles il parle nous parlons vous parlez ils parlent

Safari

84.193.165.47 19:01, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

Bold textThis is pretty misleading. Charles Matthews 09:22, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Re the suggestion to merge French Pronunciation and French Phonology. I'd suggest keeping them separate as French Pronunciation is good for beginners, and has hints e.g. about silent letters, whereas while French Phonology takes a more technical, formal approach. So they're both useful, serving different audiences.

I agree that it's useful to have to separate pages for different audiences. Hopefully examples found to be unclear can be improved upon. User:Mvcorks 17 Aug 2005

If there are two pages, they should be French phonology and French orthography, since phonology and orthography are two completely different areas. The current situation, with French phonology and orthography one on page and French pronunciation on a different page is confusing and unnecessary. --Angr/tɔk tə mi 09:48, 22 September 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Stress

I'm not quite sure about the relevancy of the example about stress. Being myself a native French speaker I can guarantee you that you wouldn't stress cathéDRALE as you would stress on [kə'θiːdrəl] in English. The pronuciation is pretty uniform along the word, even the long ones. Stressing a particular syllable does not sound very natural, except in some dialects.

Just my two cents since I'm not an expert in phonology, I just wanted to give you my feeling about that.


Answer : French uses no stress. If you saw that in the article then it's wrong. Being a native French speaker and a language nut, I can assure you so. -- Greensleaves

French utilizes stress, except that it always falls on the same syllable (with some exceptions in continuous speach), unlike English or German where it is quite unpredictable. Look it up in any book on French phonology.
Peter Isotalo 22:04, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
French does not use syllabic stress; the occasional slight stress on the last syllable of an utterance is not phonemic and is very different from the strongly marked and phonemic stress of English. And yes, I've been looking such things up for several decades. Agateller 17:24, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
But it still stresses, even if it's not phonemically distinctive. Saying French has no stress is wrong, and if people listen carefully to how you say things it will be noticeable. 24.203.155.119 02:35, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
The article cites a source for the view that French has no syllabic stress. The Wikipedia stress article also takes this view. If the opposite view is widespread it is simply a matter of citing scholarly sources to support the view. Without sources the discussion cannot go very far. Adrian Robson 12:25, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
The source does say that French has no syllabic stress. But the same source also insists on the importance in French of tonic and affective accents in word endings, a very important topic currently lacking in the wikipedia article. The necessity of putting the appropriate accents is definitively a prerequisite du Français soutenu, voire même du Français standard.
I see that all native French speakers insist on the point that there is no tonic accent in their language. Maybe it is surprising for them but speakers in whose language the tonic accent can be placed on any syllable (I'm native Spanish speaker) clearly hear a stress on the last syllable of French words. Therefore, when you learn French as a foreign language you are always explained that the stress must fall on the last non-mute vowel. I think French speakers compare their stress with that of English, which is quite different. In English, the vowels that are not stressed are not clearly pronounced. They are pronounced as short i's or ə's. Furthermore long words in English may have a main accent on one vowel and secondary accents on other vowels, which are also clearly pronounced i.e. "organization" ['o:gən'aiz'eiən"]. This does not happen in French, where all vowels, except mute e's are pronounced as if they were not stressed. I agree in the fact that when French speakers want to emphasize a word they stress every syllable i.e. ca-thé-drale but that is not the case in a complete sentence: La cathédrale de Paris est belle. luis_de_pedro 14:59, 28 October 2006 (UTC)
Indeed, most sources I have read (I don't have them at my fingertips, but I'm pretty sure the essentials are found in the Petit Robert and Grevisse's Bon Usage) state that there is a "tonic accent" at the end of a word group. Thus, in a sentence such as "Les distinctions sociales ne peuvent être fondées que sur l'utilité commune", there is a tonic accent on the syllables "ales", "dées", and "mune". When a word is pronounced independently, this principle will usually give the last syllable a light stress: compare cathédrale with cathédrale gothique.
GRAMMONT: La phrase française est composée d'un certain nombre de mots ou de groupes de mots. Chacun de ces mots ou groupes de mots porte sur sa dernière syllabe un accent d'intensité, c'est-à-dire que cette dernière syllabe est dite avec plus de force que les autres. Lesgles (talk) 17:39, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Misc.

re: "If a word is a verb (that is, it has a subject like "ils" or "elles"), and it ends in "-ent," then the final "-ent" is completely silent. This rule does not apply in some parts of Québec and North America where simply the t is silent."

Being a native speaker of French from Québec (Montréal), I wonder where in the province the 3rd person plural has the "-en" pronounced. I've never heard native speakers from different regions of Québec pronounce "-en". The entire "terminaison", e.g. "-ent" is silent.--Shimmeryhz 19:03, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

I think they do that in Gaspésie. 24.203.155.119 02:35, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Could I ask a question? How do you pronounce the third person of plural of the "passé indéfini" (aimerent). Is the "r" mute or not? --luis_de_pedro 15:03, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

I think you are referring to the simple past or passé simple: j'aimai, tu aimas, il aima, nous aimâmes, vous aimâtes, ils aimèrent. Aimèrent is pronounced [ɛmɛːʁ] (eh-mehr). The "r" is pronounced, but the "ent" is still silent. (It's often more efficient to post questions not directly related to the editing of the article at Wikipedia:Reference Desk). Lesgles (talk) 17:15, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Merge

I put the merge tag up because, as far as I can tell, the French phonology page not only covers the same ground, but does so to a much more extensive degree. This article should just be deleted and French pronunciation then redirect to French phonology. AEuSoes1 02:09, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

I disagree. Linguists, or those interested in linguistic structure, will look at phonology. Others will come here to learn how to look at a French word written and pronounce it, which is not at all covered in the other article. The purposes are different, so the article should remain separate. --67.109.56.162 23:32, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pas cette tra-la-la!

The British (yes, even the OED) love to use the symbol [a] for the sound in father (instead of [ɑ]) because they don't have a different pronunciation for the vowel in the word car as in America (before the r-coloring). Well, there's a difference in proper French between the pronunciation of pas and la, and it mirrors the American pronunciation of father and car. I would expect this difference to be given on this page.

Yet contrariwise I have read that recently the common folk of France no longer take the trouble to use the different sound in pas anymore. So I would also expect to find something about this matter on this page. Sobolewski 19:50, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pronunciation of é/er/ez

I decided to post here instead of starting an edit war. I recently changed the pronunciation guide for é/er/ez from "pay" to "sit". According to wikt:pay, the pronunciation is [peI]. However, in the American dialect, the pronunciation is much closer to [pɛI]. So I then decided to look up the pronunciation of sit. Shockingly, it is marked as IPA [sIt], not IPA [set]. Maybe this is just a matter of differences in the British and American pronunciation? Am I just not getting the IPA pronunciation?
Because introductory French textbooks and examples of pronunciation in the media mark the pronunciation similar to the example "pay but shorter", this causes the vast majority of English speakers learning French to mispronounce all words containing é/er/ez. Either they end up pronouncing é/ez/er the same as è, or é/ez/er as èï. When I correct people's pronunciation, and tell them that its sounds like the i in 'sit', then they sound much closer to the correct pronunciation. Am I making sense here?--Cnadolski 21:07, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

The last edit replaced pay with "chaos", but that's still not quite right. The example implies that would make it sound like the French [ké-os], but reality sounds more like [queil os]. User:Lesgles what regions are you from? My English is Midwestern, and my French is Parisien/Normand.--Cnadolski 23:24, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Okay, I'll relent in that what you say is true for British variants of English, but I'm putting up a pronunciation sample for clarity.--Cnadolski 15:57, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] OK...

The AFD has been settled and we need an admin to merge this page.--PrestonH 06:10, 9 December 2006 (UTC)