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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?

#111

Post by Koshkin »

yakkomajuri wrote: post #38
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…

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.

Finnish is not unique in that it has quite a few dialects like most other languages.

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

#112

Post by scrumper »

huhtenberg wrote: post #90
Muromec wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's it. That's how it should be explained. That's contingent on your ability to imagine sounds doing ups and downs.

Probably more on imaging / as going up and \ as going down. I'd think that associating pitch increase/decrease with up/down works for the vast majority of people without any second thought.

My first French teacher drew a picture of a smiling triangular-topped tombstone with long eyelashes on the blackboard, the word "acute" written up the left (ascending) side of the top and "grave" down the right hand side. A cute grave. Easy to remember. And fairly useless, since it doesn't help a whit with how to pronounce those accents.

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

#113

Post by Koshkin »

z500 wrote: post #61
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The only problem with that is the vast number of declensions. Sure they're not as wildly divergent as, say Latin or Ancient Greek, and there's no gender, but because of all the cases there's a lot of subtle variations to remember

Sure; this has nothing to do with the way written words are spoken, though.

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

#114

Post by astrobe_ »

huhtenberg wrote: post #88
_ache_ wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And ê, when pronounced (most of the cases) it's just a è. ë, contrary as said in the article (full slop?) is the most complicated and with some exceptions. But there is so few words that use that letter that you just don't have to care. Just pronounce ë as è when its in (inside) a word and not pronounced at all when it's at the end. The only exception I can think of is canoë (pronounced conoé), but everybody will und…

> ë What else is there with ë except for Noël and Israël ?

Ambiguë (ambiguous) and aiguë (acute) [1], but these are "old" spellings.

For instance, this word "ambiguë" was changed in the 1990 spelling reform to "ambigüe" [2] probably to emphasis the fact that the U is not mute (because for most -gue words it is, like for "fatigue" in french and english).

Like with ï and ü, the tréma mark is precisely the mark of an exception.

[1] https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/ambigu%C3%AB , https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/aigu%C3%AB

[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ambig%C3%BCe

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

#115

Post by Koshkin »

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…

> a single way to pronounce it

Within a particular dialect, that is.

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

#116

Post by Koshkin »

School-Cotton wrote: post #104
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You do not guess, you learn.

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

#117

Post by Koshkin »

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 :

I could guess that solely from the space before ':'

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

#118

Post by [deleted] »

Krssst wrote: post #95
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: there absolutely is a difference, at least in the "heard on TV" accent. Could you be talking about the southern accent where maybe those sound similar? A pet theory of mine is that people confusing "est" (sounds like "è", means "[he/she/it] is") and "et" (sounds like "é", means "and") while writing grew up with an accent that does not make the distinction between those sounds. (I don't criticize t…

[deleted]

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

#119

Post by Koshkin »

Muromec wrote: post #75
nathan_douglas wrote: post #10

I'm trying to get to B2/C1 in French and intend to move to France in 2028. Over the years I've picked up a little Spanish here, took a few years of German there, etc. Recently I read _Erec and Enide_ [1] and it was really cool to be able to find the original Old French version of it and read large parts of it (not the whole thing) and find it so much easier to read than Early Middle English like the _Ancrene Wisse_ […

Is it even possible to actually learn the language without living in the environment, where it gets in your face all the time?

Yes. Linguists do that all the time. People do learn Latin, etc.
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