Further on "silent" phonemes [was Re: PIE e/o Ablaut]

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Anthony Appleyard" <mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk>
Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2000 1:51 PM

[snip]. ...

> An example of such a "silent phoneme" that some would invent, in a more
> familiar language, is the French "h aspire'" that prevents liaison in some
> French words, e.g. "le haricot" {l#ariko}, "les haricots2 {leariko}, where
> by the above analogy some would write {ariko} as {=ariko}. That this
> French so-called `=' phoneme is derived from a pronounced {h} sound, is
> merely old history (except in Normandy, where this {h} sound persists, or
> so I read once.)  Likewise in standard modern French, final closed {e} as
> in "je donnai", and final open {e} as in "je donnais", are now separate
> phonemes, whereas they were once likely allophones according to whether or
> not they were followed by a now-vanished final consonant.

 [Ed Selleslagh]

Just a remark concerning this example only:

In Wallonia, the French speaking south of Belgium, local people, especially in
the regions where the Walloon 'dialect' (actually a separate language, vaguely
similar to French but with lots of different words and phonetics) is still
spoken, still aspirate the 'h-aspiré' very much (in particular within words,
like the name of the village of Jalhay) like in Dutch or German. Maybe this is
a lingering old influence from Germanic in Normandy (Scandinavian) and Wallonia
(Frankish).

In Belgian French the distinction between 'je donnai' and 'je donnais' is
usually quite clear: the first one is often pronounced as if it ended in
'e-accent aigu'. But on French radio and TV you hear more and more e.g.
'donnerai' and 'donnerais' being pronounced identically. So I wonder about the
direction of the evolution.

Ed.