How to distinguish è é e ê

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Le Baron
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Re: How to distinguish è é e ê

Postby Le Baron » Sat May 21, 2022 8:05 pm

tractor wrote:Yes, it does.

though, thought, taught, tough, cuff, cough, find, wind, wind, life, live, have, save, bus, busy, tow, now, sow, sew, blew, blue, hi, high, lead, lead, led, read, read, red

These are commonly wheeled out and yet more people seem to manage English than French. I wonder why? Homonyms/homographs are not unique to English; French has thousands of words that sound the same. They can be learned in context. In English you can also hear the vast majority of their endings. It works best for people learning to speak than learning to read (or only learning to read).

Things like 'cough' (cognate to Dutch 'kuch' so a clue as to the original sound of the ending), are an awkward group. The few exceptions can be learned. We could add the spelling of 'dough' and 'furlough'. It's an inconsistent thing, but again the exceptions are few. All of them relics of a gutteral 'g' sound.

French doesn't make 'more sense' it's just awkward in a different way. Both or them are orthographically awkward in different ways and French's pronunciation is generally considered far more awkward.
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Re: How to distinguish è é e ê

Postby tractor » Sat May 21, 2022 9:43 pm

From a purely phonological and phonetic viewpoint, I don't think English is extraordinarily complex. There are about 20 vowels and diphthongs and 24 consonant sounds, depending on how you count.

The complexity is in the spelling. Almost every letter or letter combination can be pronounced in different ways, and almost every sound can be spelt in different ways. How can a learner know that the w in "sword" is mute? And if he knows the pronunciation, but not the spelling, how on earth can he guess that it should be spelt "sword" and not "soard""? Why do we write 'beef' and not 'beaf'? After all, we write "leaf" and not "leef". And "lief" is pronounced the same way as "leaf"... "Lamb" and "ham". "Dumb" and "come". "Blood" has a different vowel sound than "hood" and then there's a third vowel sound in "hoof". The second a in "narrative" is not pronounced the same way as the second a in "narrator". Sure, you can set up a number of rules, but they will either be overly complex or full of exceptions, or both.

I'm not saying that French spelling isn't awkward, but it's not as awkward as English. As for the awkwardness of the pronunciations of French and English, I find them hard to compare. They are both awkward to me as a Norwegian.

Why do more people manage English than French? Well, English is the de facto international lingua franca. It's more useful to most people. Way more people are laerning English than French. In many countries English is all over the place. Besides, there's more to language than spelling and pronunciation. English grammar isn't overly complex.
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Re: How to distinguish è é e ê

Postby Le Baron » Sat May 21, 2022 10:02 pm

Calm yourself man. The posts further up are gentle poking of fun at the peculiarities in French. That's all.
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Re: How to distinguish è é e ê

Postby tractor » Sat May 21, 2022 10:18 pm

Le Baron wrote:Calm yourself man. The posts further up are gentle poking of fun at the peculiarities in French. That's all.

I know that. And I'm completely calm. Maybe you should calm yourself.
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Re: How to distinguish è é e ê

Postby Le Baron » Sat May 21, 2022 10:36 pm

tractor wrote:
Le Baron wrote:Calm yourself man. The posts further up are gentle poking of fun at the peculiarities in French. That's all.

I know that. And I'm completely calm. Maybe you should calm yourself.

Right. Rather peculiar all this.
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Re: How to distinguish è é e ê

Postby rdearman » Sat May 21, 2022 10:57 pm

tractor wrote:From a purely phonological and phonetic viewpoint, I don't think English is extraordinarily complex. There are about 20 vowels and diphthongs and 24 consonant sounds, depending on how you count.

The complexity is in the spelling. Almost every letter or letter combination can be pronounced in different ways, and almost every sound can be spelt in different ways. How can a learner know that the w in "sword" is mute? And if he knows the pronunciation, but not the spelling, how on earth can he guess that it should be spelt "sword" and not "soard""? Why do we write 'beef' and not 'beaf'? After all, we write "leaf" and not "leef". And "lief" is pronounced the same way as "leaf"... "Lamb" and "ham". "Dumb" and "come". "Blood" has a different vowel sound than "hood" and then there's a third vowel sound in "hoof". The second a in "narrative" is not pronounced the same way as the second a in "narrator". Sure, you can set up a number of rules, but they will either be overly complex or full of exceptions, or both.

I'm not saying that French spelling isn't awkward, but it's not as awkward as English. As for the awkwardness of the pronunciations of French and English, I find them hard to compare. They are both awkward to me as a Norwegian.

Why do more people manage English than French? Well, English is the de facto international lingua franca. It's more useful to most people. Way more people are laerning English than French. In many countries English is all over the place. Besides, there's more to language than spelling and pronunciation. English grammar isn't overly complex.

This is because someone once told an Englishman that French was more complicated and complex than English, and we couldn't have that now, could we? :lol:
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Re: How to distinguish è é e ê

Postby Dragon27 » Sun May 22, 2022 5:49 am

From my experience (a native speaker of Russian), English spelling is far more inconsistent and littered with exceptions (and harder to guess the pronunciation from) than French. Sure, French decided to keep its historical endings which don't exist anymore, but you quickly get used to them. There's a certain consistency to them, some letters are often silent, some aren't, and you start to feel that intuitively after some time (of course, there are some exceptions here and there, you should always consult a dictionary).

Guessing the spelling from pronunciation is still a problem even in Spanish (where there are silent H, indistinguishable B/V, merging of /ʎ/ and /ʝ/ for the majority of speakers and merging of /θ/ and /s/ for the Latin American Spanish).
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Re: How to distinguish è é e ê

Postby PeterMollenburg » Sun May 22, 2022 11:29 am

Dragon27 wrote:From my experience (a native speaker of Russian), English spelling is far more inconsistent and littered with exceptions (and harder to guess the pronunciation from) than French. Sure, French decided to keep its historical endings which don't exist anymore, but you quickly get used to them. There's a certain consistency to them, some letters are often silent, some aren't, and you start to feel that intuitively after some time (of course, there are some exceptions here and there, you should always consult a dictionary).


As a native English speaker, I agree. If you study the phonetic patterns (if that's a real expression?) of the two languages, French is much more predictable when it comes to reading and writing.

I remember listening to a podcast about bilingualism (French/English). A teacher was commenting on her and other teachers' observations at a bilingual English/French school in NYC. It was quite a flexible program in that those with their mother tongue being French would be taught to read and write at the blingual school in French first. Same for native English speakers - English first. Strong bilingual cases (perhaps one parent one language situation at home, thereby having two native languages - FR + EN) were decided on a case by case review from memory as to which language would be their first language to learn to read in.

The Francophone students who learned to read and write French first were significantly faster at reaching a good reading/writing level than the native English speakers learning to read and write in English first. While I can't remember the specific numbers and I may be way off now, were I to guess, the difference was at least 6 months (if not more) longer for those learning to read and write English first compared to those learning the same in French first. I assume that all students had exposure to both languages in the form of speech throughout their schooling, given it is a bilingual school, and the intention was to teach reading and writing (as well as the other skills, ie listening and speaking) of both languages to all students eventually.

The teacher (the podcast was in French) was explaining that the phonetic unpredictability of English when learning to read and write was the cause of the longer duration for those learners. So significant was the delay that those who learned to read and write French first actually began learning and made significant in-roads on reading and writing their second language - English, to the extent that they were matching the English first learners after a couple of years (again rusty on the times) in English after having learned French first. ie. The French (reading and writing) first learners had caught up in English (reading and writing) level to the English (reading and writing) first learners who hadn't moved onto French yet.

When I've watched my eldest daughter learning to read at home with us - my wife teaches English, I teach Dutch and French (we homeschool), the Dutch predictability seems so easy to her, the French seems trickier than Dutch, but still predictable and yet much easier than English. This isn't a dig nor a competition of French vs English (or Dutch), it's just that some languages are not very well represented in spelling in terms of their phonetic predictability, or transcribing what you hear into words. English is a nightmare. French I feel is unfairly labelled as complicated.

Furthermore, back to the bilingual school situation. Comments were made (by the same teacher) at the school towards the end of the podcast around how Mandarin (native) pupils in China learn to read books such as Harry Potter at a considerably later age than Europeans/North Americans etc. The discussion was then around the complexity of Mandarin and that it takes several more years for pupils of Mandarin to be able to tackle certain literature that would be read earlier in languages such as English or French in their corresponding native contexts. Of course this is all anecdotal, but interesting food for though all the same.
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Re: How to distinguish è é e ê

Postby Le Baron » Sun May 22, 2022 12:28 pm

PeterMollenburg wrote:French I feel is unfairly labelled as complicated


Maybe. People say this, but then also the number one complaint by people learning French who come to the language cafe is: pronunciation/spelling gap and how they can't understand spoken French a lot of the time despite being able to read very well.

Had this thread been followed in good faith it would have been acknowledged that it is about oral pronunciation and very slight differences between distinct sounds as represented in their orthographic form....in French. Why it was quickly turned to a 'well English is worse!' thread was just an irrelevance. The modern buzzword for it is, I believe' 'whataboutery'. And to what end? Who would argue that English is orthographically consistent anyway? Nobody.

To repeat, the thread is about French pronunciation, with a bit of ribbing for fun. Pointing to English's well-known unreformed spelling is no help at all.
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Re: How to distinguish è é e ê

Postby tractor » Sun May 22, 2022 1:55 pm

Well, you're the one who chose to follow up on my one line comment:

Le Baron wrote:
tractor wrote:Still, it makes more sense than English spelling.

Does it though? English spelling is wayward and unreformed, but at least you can hear the endings and it has no diacritics.

Maybe you should have a look in the mirror before complaining about a lack of good faith and whataboutery.
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