Help talk:IPA/French/Archive 2
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Some of these seem plain wrong
saut/haut/bureau/chose are said with a sound similar to o as in load/blow/retroactive, however story is said with o as in store/pour/or/oar etc.
pâte seems to be dependent on region but the 'common' pronunciation seems to be a as in bat rather than bra
sort/minimum/hôpital are all listed as sounding like the british off. However, I don't see that those three french words actually use the same vowel sounds. Listening to the the various pronunciations on wiktionary suggest that they are different sounds. sort seems similar to off, but the others sound like different sounds. The sound in minimum sounds more like ə or perhaps œ̃. The sound in hôpital sounds more like o.
I'm posting here for discussion first as I imagine these are pretty subjective.
Source: English native/resident - I don't believe that any of my comments here are affected by regional variations, at least not within the UK.
Stripybadger (talk) 08:36, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
- It's kind of difficult to find something perfect for these sounds. The sound of French haut is [o]. We were trying to go with something monophthongal, and the sound of English load is [oʊ in American English, which is at least somewhat close, and [əʊ] in RP, which is pretty off. For some of these other IPA guides, we've done dialect-specific approximations and that may be called for here.
- Do you have a source that says as much about pâte? I'm seeing the opposite claim elsewhere around the project, but I didn't notice any citations to see what experts have to say on the matter.
- It's not necessarily a good idea to rely on our ears for this sort of thing. It may be one of those dialect-variant kind of things that we then just have to make a choice about (I notice that the wiktionary entry on hôpital lists two different pronunciations. It looks like a few words were added by A11w1ss3nd in this edit. — Ƶ§œš¹ [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 17:27, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
- The vowel in story is often transcribed with ⟨ɔ⟩, but the actual quality in both RP and GA nowadays is between the cardinal [ɔ] and [o], if not closer to [o]. The vowel in off is /ɒ/ in RP and /ɔ/ in traditional GA, and in cot–caught merging accents it is somewhere in the vicinity of [ɑ~ɒ~ɔ]. The authoritative Trésor de la langue française informatisé transcribes both minimum and hôpital with [ɔ]. There are not many places where pâte is still pronounced differently from patte at least in France, but in those places the vowel in the former is indeed closer to that in bra than in bat. Nardog (talk) 17:42, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
- To me it doesn't come to a surprise that the vowel in sort is further back than the last vowel in minimum or the first vowel in hôpital. Though I am more familiar with Belgian than Metropolitan French it seems clear that pre-rhotic vowels are way backer than their allophones in other environments. That has no impact on our (pan-)English equivalents, though. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 19:08, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
I have always seen the French e written with a schwa (inverted e) as here. The entry compares the sound with the English first syllable in "about". But to my ears, the sound has always been closer to the oo in foot. Is it just me? Johnm307 (talk) 16:38, 6 April 2021 (UTC)