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

On Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:54:38 -0400, Nathan Sanders
<nsanders@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:nsanders-9AFA39.16543827032008@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
in sci.lang:

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.

The author of the 'French' section of the Handbook of the
IPA describes it as a central vowel with some rounding and
places it squarely at the schwa point of the quadrilateral.
It's been a while since I last heard much French, but that
or something just a little further forward sounds about
right to me, and unstressed [ø] definitely sounds wrong.
It's possible that barred-o (X-SAMPA [8]) would be slightly
more accurate, but in the absence of any other vowel in that
range the more familiar [@] doesn't seem unreasonable.

[...]

Brian
.

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