Re: I'm finally asking (re French)

On Nov 11, 7:26 am, Harlan Messinger
<hmessinger.removet...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
....
No, this seems to be a case of le is /le/. As you say, the /e/ value
is not phonemic except regionally

What I meant was, he isn't pluralizing, he was using "leh" to represent
French "le", not French "les", which he would probably represent as
"lay" or "ley". For us, "eh" is the "e" in "best" or French "mère".

Well then, isn't it time to tell learners that any value of e is
equally understandable?

Although I think many Americans, for French "le", would use "luh". (I
would guess that English people might use "lur" or "ler".)

A lur or even a luh are understandable.

English-speakers who haven't studied the matter don't think or know
about glides and many people who study French or, for that matter,
Spanish or Italian or any of a number of other languages, aren't
explicitly aware of the glide that distinguishes our vowel from the
similar-sounding one in those languages. In informal phonetic
representations, the "y" in "ey" isn't standing on its own to represent
the glide.

All right, then someone who should know better, teacher or book
publisher, is teaching them crap and should be stopped.

Similarly, "eh" to represent the pronunciation of the
"e" in "best" is understood to represent what we perceive as a single
sound, not as a vowel followed by an aspiration.

And what you need is just an understandable single sound of e in best,
no aspiration or curlicues.

.

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