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French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?

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Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?

#101

Post by mytailorisrich »

nbernard wrote: post #71

> Ë with diaeresis is the easiest case to deal with. The diaeresis (the two dots) signifies that the underlying “e” is pronounced as /ɛ/ (as “e” in “bet”, i.e. the open e), no matter what comes around it, and is used in groups of vowels that would otherwise be pronounced differently. Yes, but there are other uses. For instance, in "ambiguë", the ë itself is silent but signals that the u before it is pronounced as a s…

Yes "ambiguë" is pronounced exactly as if it was written "ambigu".

The thing here for those wondering is the masculine and feminine in French, with the feminine created by adding an 'e' (often silent!). "Ambigu" is masculine and "ambiguë" is feminine but as you said without the diaeresis that final 'e' would completely change the pronounciation of the word.

Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?

#102

Post by artwr »

khancyr wrote: post #9

French person here : no differences, we pronounce them all é and we don't care. For record, if ever you are ashamed to have some accent in french, one current top show in France with French people on it got french subtitles (about farmer looking for love)

That's patently false in my dialect at the very least...

But also true that we have some strong local accents, and that people no matter their level should feel encouraged to at least try to speak French. It's the best way to learn.

Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?

#103

Post by AStrangeMorrow »

isolli wrote: post #40
skydhash wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first one (un) is different from the others.

So I've been told... but I could never hear the difference myself!

Arguably so is “aim/ein etc” and “in”, though more dialect dependent and more subtle.

The former for me have a bit more exhale and round sound while the “in” are a tad drier.

For example “fin” and “faim” are distinct for me. However “faim” and “feint”

Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?

#104

Post by School-Cotton »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #49
yakkomajuri wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most phonetically consistent language I know is Finnish. I believe there is exactly one way to pronounce every word and it's clear to all speakers. And the least phonetically consistent is English.

Spanish also has that property, i.e. given a word (existing or invented), there is a single way to pronounce it, easy to determine following some rules.* Finnish (from what I've heard, as I don't speak it) is even more regular in the sense that this also works the other way around, i.e., if you hear a word, you can use rules to know how to spell it. This does not always hold in Spanish (e.g. B and V are pronounced th…

Spanish does have a few exceptions, mainly due to loanwords from indigenous American languages. For example, it would not be possible to guess that the X in México is pronounced like Spanish J.

Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?

#105

Post by Lalabadie »

thiht wrote: post #54
khancyr wrote: post #9

French person here : no differences, we pronounce them all é and we don't care. For record, if ever you are ashamed to have some accent in french, one current top show in France with French people on it got french subtitles (about farmer looking for love)

> French person here : no differences, we pronounce them all é and we don't care. No we don’t, wtf é and è (as well as e but it goes without saying) are very clearly distinct sounds.

French in lots of regions in France has lost many distinctions in how things are pronounced. Paris french prononounces -en, -an, and -in almost or completely the same, for example.

I suppose you're replying to someone from the area. And it's undoubtedly Parisien to assume that the way they pronounce is how the whole country does it, lol

Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?

#106

Post by School-Cotton »

1-more wrote: post #28
khancyr wrote: post #9

French person here : no differences, we pronounce them all é and we don't care. For record, if ever you are ashamed to have some accent in french, one current top show in France with French people on it got french subtitles (about farmer looking for love)

> one current top show in France with French people on it got french subtitles One friend of mine once had to translate English-to-English in France. A French policeman or taxi driver or something knew English as a second language. My friend is from New Jersey and sounds like what I might call CNN English (is there a name for roughly "unaccented" Northeast/West Coast/DC English?). The other person he was with had a t…

> (is there a name for roughly "unaccented" Northeast/West Coast/DC English?)

General American English.

Although it's traditionally much more common among white people in the western half of the country. People on the east coast, as well as black people everywhere, traditionally have distinctive accents (though these are fading over time, and many people from either group now speak pure General American).

Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?

#107

Post by School-Cotton »

huhtenberg wrote: post #51

If there's one thing I wish someone pointed out when I was just starting learning French is this: é - the accent is pointing up, so it's a higher-pitched e è - the accent is pointing down, so it's a lower-pitched e That's it. That's how it should be explained. * It's also in their names - aigu and grave, but this requires knowing what these words mean.

I'm a non-native French speaker, but I am pretty confident that's not true. They are actually different sounds, not just the same sound at a different pitch.

French is not a tonal language like Chinese. Pitch is not used to distinguish between different phonemes.

Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?

#108

Post by moribvndvs »

strongpigeon wrote: post #5

As a native (Québécois) French speaker who's been living in the US for most of my adult life, something I miss from French is that once you've learned the (many) rules, you can be pretty confident about how to pronounce a given word. English on the other hand has so many exceptions (usually based on the origin of the word), that I still encounter words that I'll mispronounce at first. I can typically pass as a native…

I’m learning Japanese, which is overall a difficult language for a native English speaker to learn. However, the rules for pronunciation are comparatively a big relief, as is hiragana/katakana

Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?

#109

Post by ithkuil »

throw0101a wrote: post #96
cryptonector wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A uniquely... English word, that.

It originated in Prague due to two incidents: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestration#Origin * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestrations_of_Prague

Also used in Italian and presumably in many other languages.

Like with any word, it's use in colloquial form may vary from generation to generation, from subculture to subculture etc

Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?

#110

Post by keeda »

Ugh, I'm triggered. The hardest part about learning French in school was these damn accents. I never quite got the rules and could not memorize the spellings, and so in my written tests I'd just randomly throw in some accent on some letter if I kinda remembered or, more often, guessed that one belonged in there somewhere.

This annoyed my French teacher, a native Parisian, no end. She'd get extremely frustrated and say something like "Can't you hear what you wrote?! You don't pronounce 'Noël' as 'Noél', that sounds ridiculous!" and for the life of me I could not hear the difference.

Yeah, my French grades weren't great. But I redeemed myself much later in life by having an extended spoken conversation, where misspellings matter much less, in French with a very patient Canadian listener.

Also I felt better to find out a lot of the differences in various French accents relate to how these vowels are pronounced. A funny anecdote I heard was from a Qubecios person who visited Paris and placed an order at a restaurant in French. The two waitresses stared at him for a couple of seconds, and then one of them leaned to the other and whispered, in French, "I think he's trying to speak French."

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