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ArchivesRe: How would Vespasienne (fem.) be pronounced in French?
in reply to a message by CN
When I was saying that the [e] is only present in English in the group [eI] (which is the sound of the word pain or play) I'm refering to the first sound of the diphthong, obviously.
The sound of feu, peu... is [ø] (which it seems that is the sound of the Swedish Ö/Ø) and the sound of jeune is [œ], two different sounds even in French. These sounds are represented by EU, not only by E and they are not the same that the English [ɜ:]. If you have to explain EU to an English, ok, you can do more or less the analogy, but in Vespasienne there is not EU and your post refered strictely to E.
That to a speaker a foreign sound "sounds" like another sound in other language, it doesn't mean that both sounds are the same. All the speakers distribute what they hear according their phonemes: what is two or three distinctive phonemes in a language, can be simply allophones in another one.
Even in the case of people whith a strong training in phonetics and used to do IPA phonetic transcriptions, often it is very hard to "hear" clearly a sound that is not in your own repertoire.
I take always Wikipedia with a grain of salt, but in the case of the phonetic descriptions of the languages is very accurated and matches the documentation that I have about phonetics in general, Romance phonetics and French phonetics from my degree courses.
Lumia
http://onomastica.mailcatala.com
The sound of feu, peu... is [ø] (which it seems that is the sound of the Swedish Ö/Ø) and the sound of jeune is [œ], two different sounds even in French. These sounds are represented by EU, not only by E and they are not the same that the English [ɜ:]. If you have to explain EU to an English, ok, you can do more or less the analogy, but in Vespasienne there is not EU and your post refered strictely to E.
That to a speaker a foreign sound "sounds" like another sound in other language, it doesn't mean that both sounds are the same. All the speakers distribute what they hear according their phonemes: what is two or three distinctive phonemes in a language, can be simply allophones in another one.
Even in the case of people whith a strong training in phonetics and used to do IPA phonetic transcriptions, often it is very hard to "hear" clearly a sound that is not in your own repertoire.
I take always Wikipedia with a grain of salt, but in the case of the phonetic descriptions of the languages is very accurated and matches the documentation that I have about phonetics in general, Romance phonetics and French phonetics from my degree courses.
Lumia
http://onomastica.mailcatala.com
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