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

On 2008-03-28, Christian Weisgerber wrote:

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.

Fair enough.

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

Interesting. (But where I lived in France, "an" and "on" seemed
indistinguishable (or nearly), whereas I think "in" and "un" were
slightly different.)


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.

:-)

--
I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, [my daughter] will come to me
and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press
away from the Internet?' [Mike Godwin, EFF http://www.eff.org/ ]
.

Relevant Pages