Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or defenestrate...
A uniquely... English word, that.
Not at all. It's just the Latin prefix "de" (out of) plus "fenester" meaning window. Not an English word except by borrowing.
French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
121–130 of 165 posts
Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
You pronounce "fête" as "féte" (basically, equivalent to the English "faith" without the "h" sound at the end)? To my hear these two sound very different.
> You pronounce "fête" as "féte"? No, they don’t.
Ok, so what did I misunderstand in OP sentence "no differences, we pronounce them all é and we don't care."? "them" is not referring at all possible accentuation of the letter e?
Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
#123The disagreements ITT at least answer the question I came away with after scanning this post—"if these are almost all pronounced the same, why the different diacriticals?"
The partial answer being, some dialects retain differences and they are significant. My own accent is not terrible especially for an American raised when and where I was, but I internalized it early enough (just through middle school instruction, sadly) that I don't even know if I pronounce them all the same... I'd have to read some passages and inspect.
But I was hoping for a little more by way of explicit discussion of the why, which I infer is largely: diacriticals are mostly artifacts of etymology which at some point became ossified and absent a Dudens-like change in prescriptive heart, are here to stay, mostly unvoiced indicators of language evolution (like the silent k and gh in English knight).
Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
You pronounce "fête" as "féte" (basically, equivalent to the English "faith" without the "h" sound at the end)? To my hear these two sound very different.
> "féte" (basically, equivalent to the English "faith" without the "h" sound at the end) Not GP but I want to note that the pronounciation of "faith" would never occur in metropolitan French, as it features a diphthong. And in Quebec fête has a diphthong but féte would not have one I think (please correct me if I am wrong), and it is not the one in faith anyway.
Good point, I was trying to figure out how I would actually pronounce "féte". My main argument was that in any case, it wouldn't sound close to "fête" (or "fète"), which sound more like "faîte" in French -- as in "au faîte de sa popularité".
Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
#125As a native in English speaker, I refuse to switch to the French keyboard when writing in French I just don’t bother with accents. Why can’t French just be normal and know how to pronounce words without any hints like we do in English?
Cough, though, tough, ... Good luck guessing the pronounciation just gotta learn it. Clearly the superior system.
cough: la tout (f.)
Or un toussement (m.)
Actually, if they used accents to denote, whether a word was male or female, I would be totally down.
Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
#126As 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…
French and English are roughly on par for how terrible they are at this.
Relevant concept here is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth
Source: native French speaker and professional translator.
Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
It's my go-to (pun intended) whenever a native English speaker complains about other languages being "hard to pronounce" :)
this is my personal favorite: https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
#128French 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)
Les français de l'académie française just prove my point : so much ways to pronounce the same word that we don't care beside on internet, like for la raisintine...
Getting the wrong é/è/ê/ë won't make you not understandable.
e is indeed different
Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
#129Earlier 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…
I agree, and I've heard this property referred to by linguists as a "shallow orthography".
Re: French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
What did the server bring to your table? A fan?
They understood what I meant, and then the French folks I was with had a long discussion with me about how it's not the same sound.
Yeah, I've been there. Apparently my pronunciation of "Chretien" (Christian) was indecipherable, and the French people I was speaking with clarified it for me by saying, "you're saying cray-tee-uh(n), but it's pronounced cray-tee-uh(n)"