ADS-L Digest - 21 May 2004 to 22 May 2004 (#2004-144)

[Mark A. Mandel]

Damien Hall writes

        >>>

Heard on NPR, 12 May:  the phrase *coup de grâce* pronounced [ku duh
gra].  It made me wonder how widespread it was to hear French phrases
that have been imported into English pronounced without their legitimate
final consonants.  I speculate that it's on the model of things like
*grand prix* /grã pri/, where the final consonant is legitimately not
pronounced, which give people a feeling that final consonants should not
be pronounced in any word which they are conscious is French.  Does
anyone have any further examples or thoughts on this?
        <<<

My wife does this fairly frequently; I notice it most often on this
specific phrase, but it's not restricted to this phrase or to this
speaker. I call it "French final consonant deletion", and I hypothesize
the same cause that you do.

On skimming down through the Digest, I see that several others who get
the ADS while it's hot have added to this thread. Oh, well, I won't
let that stop me.

My word! You're local and I haven't met you. I must get around the
campus outside my office more often.

Mark A. Mandel, Research Administrator
Biomedical Information Extraction, Linguistic Data Consortium
University of Pennsylvania

[This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]