reservwah (was: paraplegic)

[Mark A. Mandel]

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> 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]?).

<<<<<

And I realized after getting home last night that AAMOF my wife's habit
that I was trying to refer to is EXACTLY as Larry describes, not the more
limited way that I described it. In other words, this "French final
consonant deletion" is something like "delete the final consonant *phoneme*
of any French word".

Larry's "coupe de ville" test case may be unreliable because of possible confusion with "coup".

-- Mark