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

In article <jictb5-rjp.ln1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Adam Funk <a24061@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 2008-03-25, Nathan Sanders wrote:

I think the issue is that French schwa is not actually "that sound" (a
mid central unrounded vowel), but rather a mid front round vowel,
somewhat like [o] and [oe] (in fact, I *think* I recall that it can be
analyzed as just an unstressed positional variant of the /o/ and /oe/
phonemes, but I'm not sure about this).

(Oops, looks like my slashed-o and oe-ligature didn't come through
correctly.)

I looked in a few apparently IPA-using French-English and French
dictionaries: they all use "that upside-down-e" for the vowel in "je"
and the first vowel in "jeter", but they use ø (slashed o) for the one
in "jeu".

Are the dictionaries consistently misusing the IPA or idealizing
French pronunciation, or am I wrong in thinking that "upside-down-e"
means "schwa"?

I presume the former. My (admittedly limited) understanding is that
the pronunciations of <je> and <jeu> differ (only? primarily?) in
stress, not in vowel quality.

Of course, English schwa isn't always "that sound" either, often being
higher (and sometimes fronter) than true mid central.

Do you mean in different accents?

I'm sure there is dialectal variation, but between consonants, English
schwa tends to be higher and sometimes fronter (especially between
coronals), more like [barred-i], or even [I].

There are some dialects that even distinguish the higher/fronter
unstressed vowel from mid central schwa (the classic minimal pair for
these dialects is <roses> and <Rosa's>, though the different
morphological boundaries are probably a confounding factor here).

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/
.

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