View Message

Wow, I completely forgot about this post and I had no idea I had started an angry discussion. For the record (not trying to sound like a snob or anything), I am fluent in French and am working on my masters in Linguistics. I went all 4 years of highschool in France and even went to school in the area where the legend of Melusine was born. If you heard me, you would never guess I was American born. JKR, when you responded with "I don't think so" It came off as rather rude, even if those were not your intentions. For the record, I did not even see your post before I posted. I hand't noticed it before, therefore I was not correcting your pronunciation. Since the person asking is most likely an English speaker, I am was assuming that she wouldn't understand the international pronunciation keys as provided by Lumia, I think its safe to say that most people in the world would be utterly confused with the pronunciation of mely'zine if they never took a phonetics or linguistics course. Now that I saw your pronunciation and compared it to mine, it looks like we were trying to come up with the same sounds, just wrote it out differently. I guess I could have gone more in detail about stress and the U sound in French, that this can be accomplished by rounding the lips as if attempting say an O while saying an E, sorry about that. I agree with Kirke that some of the Polish pronunciations are spot on, while some of them are more like Slovak or Czech pronunciations, and the Swedish pronunciation has a lot to be desired for.

---

http://legitnames.blogspot.com

This message was edited 8/27/2009, 2:23 PM