Is French a phonetic language???

Jim   Tuesday, May 18, 2004, 02:04 GMT
The digraph "ou" is usually pronounced /au/ in English but there are many exceptions some of which Willy points out. The "ough" words are something of a special case because they contain a digraph, "gh", for a sound, a velar fricative, which has dissapeared from (almost all) English words (in almost all dialects). As this happened the sound changed into a whole bunch of different sounds or just dissapeared.

I say /th^r../ for "thorough".
Jim   Tuesday, May 18, 2004, 02:04 GMT
The digraph "ou" is usually pronounced /au/ in English but there are many exceptions some of which Willy points out. The "ough" words are something of a special case because they contain a digraph, "gh", for a sound, a velar fricative, which has dissapeared from (almost all) English words (in almost all dialects). As this happened the sound changed into a whole bunch of different sounds or just dissapeared.

I say /th^r../ for "thorough".
Simon   Tuesday, May 18, 2004, 08:19 GMT
Jim, in that interesting and thought-provoking article, he says "lawyer" is spelled indefensibly. But I find lawyer rather phonetic.
nic   Tuesday, May 18, 2004, 11:13 GMT
A letter is silent in some cases but not all the time

Example :

Je suis (you do not pronounce the “s”

But
Je suis allé (you pronouce the “s”) it makes in phonetic “je sui zallé”
Mighty Mick   Sunday, May 23, 2004, 14:00 GMT
French is spelt far more phonetically than English. The unpronounced endings in French are there for the good reason that they become pronounced for the female gender of words, for liaison and for its inflected verbs. For these reasons it's systematic and consistent and far easier to learn in terms of spelling over English.


"euil, euille, are pronounced as a palatalized German ö but are well approximated by an
ueil, and ueille. English oy.
Examples: fauteuil /fo toy/, accueil /ak koy/ "

This is a poor approximate. euil and oï (oy) are quite different, at least to my ears.
euil just doesn't exist in English.
nic   Monday, May 24, 2004, 07:23 GMT
fauteuil /fo toy?!

I don't think so
jeff   Monday, May 24, 2004, 14:52 GMT
most of the time,
it's easy to know how a word is supposed to be pronounce in english
if you now the rules, it doesn't matter what you say, english is the easiest language to learn,
Paul   Monday, May 24, 2004, 16:55 GMT
English not only has a hell of a lot of irregular verbs, but those irregular verbs are much more commonly used. I believe even when we excluded the irregular auxillary verbs, which are very common, we found more than 1/2 the words used in most English documents are irregular. The exceptions far outweigh the rules in English verbs.
Oliver   Monday, May 24, 2004, 17:15 GMT
English has more than 40 Phonemes in common use, and the Roman Alphabet has only 26 letters and some of them represent the same
phoneme (i.e. c, k, q)
The Roman Alphabet works well with Romance Languages, but not with English or other German, Slavic or Scandinavian Languages.
See expanded alphabet of Icelandic. See the Shaw or Shavian Alphabet for English. Or better yet use the ASCII Alphabet provided by Antimoon In the Pronunciation section. You don't have to use the Roman Alphabet to learn English.

Quit complaining
Jim   Tuesday, May 25, 2004, 04:44 GMT
"You don't have to use the Roman Alphabet to learn English." Sure, if you don't want to be able to read and write but you'll not get far in an English-speaking environment if you can't read or write the language.

Simon,

In defence of "lawyer" I say that you can easily see what field one works in: law. However, phonetic? Really? For me it's none too phonetic. It looks to me like it should spell /lo:j../ (i.e. "law-ya"). Is that how you pronounce the word? I say /loi../ as if it were spelt "loyer" ... maybe that looked too much like "lover": imagine the strife that might cause ... do we have another line of defence?
Simon   Tuesday, May 25, 2004, 10:01 GMT
Yes but phonetically it's easy to see how law-yer has come to sound like loyer (if you're English at least, and presumably Australian too). I understand for Americans there may not be a match as American law sounds like la to me.

Other similar words? Bowyer (obsolete). Any others?
Jim   Wednesday, May 26, 2004, 01:39 GMT
Oh, that's what you mean ... yes, then I agree: shorten /o:/ (i.e. "au"/"aw") and the closest thing is /o/ (i.e. "o").