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

Christian Weisgerber wrote:
Adam Funk <a24061@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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,

Those are phonemic transcriptions. They don't necessarily describe
the associated sounds precisely. Apart from omitting allophones
(no English dictionary distinguishes aspirated and unaspirated
voiceless stops), they will also tend to use the most convenient
symbol if there is no conflict. IPA-using English dictionaries use
/r/, despite this not being an alveolar trill in standard varieties
of the language.

or am I wrong in thinking that "upside-down-e" means "schwa"?

It does, but the actual French vowel represented by it is different
from the one represented by the same symbol in phonemic transcriptions
of, say, English or German.

Regarding the actual phonemic inventory of modern French, the choices
offered by the "phonetic" search function of the TLFi site are quite
telling:

A Amour
E rEvoir, dEUx
É École, rÊve, AImable
I Innocent
O Obliger, AUrore, burEAU
U Unité
OU OUtre
Y fiLLe, raYé, tuYau

AN ANcre
IN INfini, mais aussi brUN
ON ONctueux

So while French dictionaries still maintain a three-way distinction
between the vowels in "peu" and "peur" and the first one in "premier",
your average French speaker is rather less certain. Most shocking,
I know.

They are not equating the sounds in the respective words listed for the same vowel. They are accommodating the fact that speakers may confuse certain sounds (for example, some speakers have /e/ in certain places where other speakers have /E/), so they are providing one symbol to cover more than one sound. The words école and rêve definitely have different first vowels, and the "o" sounds in obliger and bureau are not the same. In fact, the two vowels in aurore aren't the same. Well--TLFi shows that the first vowel in aurore *can* be /O/, as the second one necessarily is. But normally "au" is /o/.

The "in" collapse reflects the fact that in some parts of France "un" is losing or has lost its nasality and is pronounced like "in".

.

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