Re: French verb conjugation: "je harcèle"? or "je harcelle"?

Adam Funk <a24061@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Also, can we please stop the highly irritating habit of calling the e
muet "schwa"? This is not Hebrew or English and the e muet has zilch
to do with that. It is misleading.

Isn't "schwa" the phonetic terminology for that sound in any language,
not just the one (Hebrew) that the term comes from?

Unless you are speaking 15th century French, the e muet is not that
sound, and nowdays not a sound at all. It's a phonological vowel
that, depending on a complex interaction of factors, is either
silent or realized as a rounded schwa, increasingly merging with
the mid front rounded vowel.

(The issue is made more complex by the fact that in the modern
language the rounded schwa can also appear non-phonemically to break
up consonant clusters, and the term e muet tends to be abused for
this, too.)

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@xxxxxxxxxxxx
.

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