Linguist Forum
Specializations => Phonetics and Phonology => Topic started by: Pramod Kumar Agrawal on January 18, 2015, 05:28:49 AM
-
I have a simple question. Please refer
http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/french-english/abandon?showCookiePolicy=true
The IPA pronunciation of a French word [étage] is /e t a ʒ/, but the available audio pronunciation suggests /ɪ t̪ ɑ ʒ/ (/t/ is dental). Which of them is correct?
-
I don't believe there would be a phonemic contrast between those two pronunciations so with natural variation it could be either. My best guess would be somewhere between the two but my French is limited.
-
Please open the site and listen it. You will see the difference between /e/ and /ɪ/, and also between /t/ and /t̪ /. If it is alright, I will consider the written part to be correct and ignore the audio part.
-
This isn't the right methodology to compare subphonemic differences. What would "correct" mean anyway?
-
French only has /t/ which makes no distinction between [t] and [t̪].
-
Thanks to frenku... .... and what about the difference between /e/ and /ɪ/ ? Should we consider that the actual pronunciation is somewhere in between /e/ and /ɪ/ ... or is there any mistake in audio sampling? .......or is there any mistake in my listening?
-
If /e.taʒ/ is the phonemic transcription of {étage} then that is the phonemic transcription of {étage}.
-
In French which of the symbol is right? /R/ or /ʁ/
-
If you're looking for the underlying form, it's often just marked as /r/ for simplicity (which also corresponds to a previous realisation by chance, still found in some regions -- see, for example, Laurentian French, though it's being lost).* If you want the way it's realised, then it's variable both regionally (ex: http://www.hum.uu.nl/medewerkers/h.vandevelde/onderzoek/Demolin.pdf) and even within speakers (ex: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~gillian/PAPERS/LifeChangeR.pdf), with some of the main options being: uvular trills or fricatives and alveolar trills. Phonologically, it's worth noting that it patterns with the voiced fricatives in the case of triggering lengthening (V --> V: / _ {v z ʒ r}), but that it does behave slightly differently in other respects (ability to be deleted, availability in clusters, devoicing (mostly in a cluster with voiceless obstruents)).
___
* Less often, but still possible, the capital /R/ is used to show an abstraction, but, like in [R], will often refer to the uvular trill pronunciation for ease of typing.