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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?

#91

Post by mytailorisrich »

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.

In the South the é sound is more common while in the North they tend to pronounce the è very 'correctly', but that does not apply to all words.

For instance the way someone pronounces "après". In the South it is quite common to pronounce it pretty much like if it was written "aprés". Same goes for "est", e.g. il est(é) vs il est(è).

That's how you recognise a Parisian in Marseille because they have an "accent pointu" ;)

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

#92

Post by yhavr »

kulesh wrote: post #57

Polish s, ś, sz, z, ź, ż, rz, c, ć, cz, si, zi, ci – what's the difference? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47533035 :)

Much simpler, IMHO

single letter = sound

letter + z = "hissing" version of the sound

letter + accent = soft version of the hissing sound

letter + i = same previous item, but caused by "i"

rz = legacy, czechs still pronounce it as a different letter

This is how I understand it as Ukrainian

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

#93

Post by Koshkin »

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" :)

To be fair, the "ghoti" joke is not about pronunciation but rather about the perceived mismatch between the way a word is written and the way it is spoken.

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

#94

Post by wat10000 »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #78
wat10000 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotta get it right or you'll order some wind instead of some wine. (Did that once, and that's how the difference finally stuck for me.)

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.

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

#95

Post by Krssst »

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 the mistake or the accent but have always been curious about this precise kind of writing mistake because those two words sound so different to me)

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

#96

Post by throw0101a »

cryptonector wrote: post #85
dismalaf wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or defenestrate...

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

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

#97

Post by School-Cotton »

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.

> 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's about it. And Japanese is even worse: most Japanese words are written using Chinese characters, but the same character can have several different pronunciations (for example, the same character might have three pronunciations: one for a Chinese loanword, another for the same Chinese loanword that entered Japan in a different century, and a third for a native Japanese word whose pronunciation isn't connected to the Chinese pronunciation at all). Also, one character in Japanese can have a several syllable pronunciation, whereas in Mandarin and Cantonese at least, polysyllabic characters are extremely rare.

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

#98

Post by throw0101a »

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…

> 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.

English is not really one language in a sense given that it uses words from some many others. Anglo-Saxon, French, Latin, Greek, etc.

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

#99

Post by artwr »

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 ?

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C3%A9ma_en_fran%C3%A7ais Some adjectives: aiguë, exiguë... (though a bunch are more commonly written with it on the ü instead) Some proper names: Gaël, Gwenaël, Ismaël

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

#100

Post by pixelhaus »

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…

Gruau would be closer to grew-oh, if it helps.

There's the classic squirrel/écureuil situation where the French word is hard to pronounce for English-speakers, and the English word is hard for French-speakers.

Loving my bilingual spot of the world.

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