reservwah (was: paraplegic)

[sagehen]

Lawrence Horn writes:

>I remember the "CaReFuL" from grade school French too, but there's
something else going on with French final consonant deletion (in
English), as illustrated by the example I used earlier of "coup de
grace", in which a typical US Eng pronunciation is [kud at gra] as
opposed to the French [kud at gras] (ignoring the differences in the
quality of the vowels, position of the [r], etc.).  The "s" (here
spelled "c") is pronounced not because it's a c but because it's not
final--it has a silent schwa after it.  (Alternately, the final "e"
is there to indicate that the preceding consonant is to be
pronounced; cf. "heureux" (vowel-final) vs. "heureuse" (z-final) or
"coup" vs. "coupe")  The rule to which Mark alludes seems to be
something like:  when in doubt, delete the consonant you would have
pronounced in an English word.  I'm not sure what the scope of the
rule is, though, since in the last item above, the "p" IS pronounced
in English ("coupe de ville", etc.--or does anyone pronounce that
[kud at vIl]?).

larry<
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I too remember the CaReFuL "rule", but there are other exceptions that do
fall outside the ones with final e cited above.  E.g., ours, verdigris,
chef, clef.  I notice that OED gives first place (frequency?) to the
pronunciation of verdigris  that doesn't sound the final s, but again, this
is out-Frenching the French, since it is Greece, not grey, that is the root
here.
A. Murie