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

On Mar 25, 1:03 pm, Adam Funk <a24...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2008-03-25, mb 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?

The question is how you define and identify "that sound".
"Schwa" as mentioned in English is supposed to be the phoneme name for
the indistintict-indistinguishable unsustained, unstressed vowel sound
that some, not all, English speakers produce for unstressed vowels
(where other speakers have a habit of producing a clearly identifiable
short vowel). In those languages that have a reserved script element
for just "schwa", sometimes stressable (Turkish, Armenian, Russian,
etc) the sound is in the IPA area of 317-18-16, 315, 323 etc. As for
Hebrew, I'll leave the definitions to the Semitists.

French, though, does not identify the phoneme e muet as any of these
indistinct sounds but as either 1. an unstressed short "eu" or 2. a
totally silent final or syllable-final zero value.

On the other hand, if you want to call "schwa" any (to you) halfway
indistinct vowel, no matter if fitting the above mentioned or not,
then its use in English or these other languages becomes invalid
because too general for any precise use.

Discussing a language's phonemes in terms dictated by speakers of
another remains unnecessarily misleading, iseunte ite maille frène-
de?
.

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