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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?

#131

Post by calfuris »

agluszak wrote: post #65
amelius wrote: post #19

Earlier 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" :)

"Ghoti" is an artificial example that doesn't actually work if you account for the way positioning affects pronunciation. Pull up a list of words that start with "gh": none of them (unless "ghoti" itself is on the list) start with an /f/ sound. You'll find the same for words ending in "ti" and the /ʃ/ sound.

I recommend asking people how "ough" is pronounced instead. Cough, bough, though, thought, through, thorough, hiccough--enough!

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

#132

Post by nuancebydefault »

loufe wrote: post #82
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 a native English speaker who became fluent in (québecois) french as an adult, I could not agree more. I have a better chance knowing how to pronounce a new word in french vs. English. Doesn't mean there aren't exceptions, but it's staggering how internally inconsistently English is.For example "read" and it's famous past tense, differently pronounced "read". Still, we've got a couple fun ones au Québec, like bett…

The most fascinating i find the pronunciation of 'women'. Of the word, i mean.

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

#134

Post by cryptonector »

QuercusMax wrote: post #121
cryptonector wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The joke was that [to my then knowledge] it's not used in Romance languages, but it is used in English.

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

#135

Post by dolmen »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #130
wat10000 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)"

And note that "crétin" means "dumb", so mispronouncing "chrétien" can seriously go wrong.

https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/cr%C3%A9tin

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

#136

Post by kergonath »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #74
kergonath wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> French person here : no differences, we pronounce them all é and we don't care. That is very far from the truth, and unhelpful. Yes, some people have accents, but it’s not because you cannot hear the difference (or at least claim you cannot) that it does not exist. Out of curiosity, how do you pronounce "il a fermé la fenêtre"? For non-French people: there are accents in which é and è are most of the time very simi…

> ... but claiming that your particular pronunciation is the one true way is ridiculous. Ah, so you're not Parisian.

Indeed I am not :D

I almost added a line about my friends from the South exaggerating their "é" because they are afraid of sounding like Parisians. In reality, who cares? It’s just that statements like "it does not matter" is really unhelpful to people who are not native speakers.

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

#137

Post by kergonath »

kalenx wrote: post #122
kergonath wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

You did not misunderstand what they wrote, it’s just that what they wrote is wrong (and you are right).

Some accents use é when standard academic French would use something else. For example, in "j’ai été fêter ça", the 5 sounds "ai", "é", "é", "ê", and "er" could sound pretty much the same. But AFAICT there is no local accent in which both the "ê" in "fête" and "fenêtre" sound like "é". Certainly nothing mainstream.

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

#138

Post by joak »

nuancebydefault wrote: post #132
loufe wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a native English speaker who became fluent in (québecois) french as an adult, I could not agree more. I have a better chance knowing how to pronounce a new word in french vs. English. Doesn't mean there aren't exceptions, but it's staggering how internally inconsistently English is.For example "read" and it's famous past tense, differently pronounced "read". Still, we've got a couple fun ones au Québec, like bett…

The most fascinating i find the pronunciation of 'women'. Of the word, i mean.

The famous ghoti as an alternate spelling for fish. Gh like in enough O like in women Ti like in nation

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

#139

Post by [deleted] »

School-Cotton wrote: post #97
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.

> And the least phonetically consistent is English. I guess maybe they're not "languages you know", so your statement is still accurate, but surely the Chinese languages and Japanese are even further than English on this spectrum. Some (but not all) Chinese characters encode how the character was pronounced in ancient Chinese, which might give a vague hint to how it's pronounced in modern Chinese languages, but that'…

[deleted]

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

#140

Post by tsoukase »

For me the greatest boost to advance European foreign language fluency was to learn for one year the Japanese. Because it dwarfs in complexity any Latin language, I was able to:

1) locate and focus at the difficult parts of each (eg English phrasal verbs, French accent, German grammar)

2) realise the huge similarity between euro languages and leverage it

3) increase my confidence in deeper learning

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