LL-L: "Historical linguistics" LOWLANDS-L, 09.AUG.2000 (04) [E/French]

Wed Aug 9 22:35:20 UTC 2000

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From: Roger Thijs [roger.thijs at village.uunet.be]
Subject: LL-L: "Historical linguistics" LOWLANDS-L, 09.AUG.2000 (01) [E]

At 07:42 9-8-2000 -0700, you wrote:
From: Stefan Israel [stefansfeder at yahoo.com]
Subject: "Historical linguistics" LOWLANDS-L,
 >>>>A full [d] is a dental or alveolar stop (a consonant
in which the tongue stops the flow of air for a
moment):  the tongue strikes the teeth (Romance
languages) or the alveolar ridge behind the teeth
(Germanic languages), whereas your description of
<dzj> sounds like a palatal stop: say “y” (e.g. Engl.
yes, German ja) and press your tongue against the
palate there.
I hadn't realized that Walloon and Flemish (how much
of Flemish?) had this feature, but Walloon has
apparently kept the old pronunciation, which Flemish
has adopted.  That's a common phenomenon when two
languages interact.<<<<<

When checking in Limburgish municipal dictionaries here, I see one rarely
recognizes dzj as a single consonant, rather as d+zj.
E.g. Xavier Staelens, in his "Dieksjenèèr van 't (H)essels, Nederlands -
Hasselts woordenboek", 1989, 582 + xxxviii pp. puts in his table of
consonants "sj" and "zj" on the crossing of "preapalatalen en palatalen"
and "fricatieven";
The square "preapalatalen en palatalen" crossing with "occlusieven" is empty.

In his comments below though he writes:
dzj:    dzjoe.mp "stomp, duw": d + zj, zoals in Eng. Jim.
Would you consider the J of Jim as two consonants or as a single one?
In my little English dictionary one writes indeed dz (the z has a tail) for
the phonetics.

The dot in dzjoe.mp stands for the tone ("sleeptoon")

Warnant in "La constitition phonique du mot wallon, Étude fondée sur le
parler d'Oreye (Hesbaye liégeoise)", Bibliotheque de la Faculté de
Philosophie et Lettres de l'Université de Liège, Fascicule CXXXV, 1956,
Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 409 pp, writes:

(Oreye is a walloon parish, just adjacent to the Limburgish language
border, and less than 10 miles from Tongeren)
(I have to find a trick: # stands for a little v on top of the consonant,
he writes c# for tch in the official orthography
and g# for dj in the official walloon orthography; dzj in Limburgish)

p. 49
La consonne c#
C'est une sourde, mi-occlusive, prédorsale prépalatale, différente de ce
que serait une suite de deux cons. t + s#.
follows description of comparative "kymogrammes" etc...

  p. 56
La consonne g#
C'est une sourde, mi-occlusive, prédorsale, prépalatale, correspondant à la
sourde c#.
Pas plus que le c#  n'est une cons. composée d'un t et d'un s#, le g# n'est
composé d'un d et d'un z#.

When I was 19 (I lived in the South of Limburg, just 20 miles from Liège),
I got a serial of 30 weekly evening courses of French pronounciation at
Liège University, given by Munot, who was an assistant of Warnant (cf. above)
As South-Limburgers we do not have some problems Dutchmen have, e.g. we
already nasalise some vowels in our dialect, etc., though I had some things
to work at:
- He could not support the way I pronounced my "s". I did it with lips
rounded, but had to do it with my lips in an horizontal fence. I got a
little wood, similar to the one, one finds in icecream sticks, but double
as large, for pushing and holding my tongue flat when pronouncing "s" in
French
- My second problem was to discard all normal Limburgish intonation for me
keeping in boring monotony, just raising at the end of the sentence
- And my third problem was to know which schwa's to pronounce:
I still have my little Fouché full of commented patterns for the "e-muet"
from p. 91 to p. 139. We had to exercise them every evening, a sample
Formule OeeOeeOe
ex.: et parc. que je n. le red.venais pas, tu pensais que...
Formule OeOeOeOee
ex.: et d. ce qu. je n. te l. reprenais pas, on pouvait conclure que

Really, people from Liège in the street do not talk that way. But the
French community has a class of snobs who really take care to do it the
very same ways as "la prononciation en usage dans une conversation
"soignée" chez les Parisiens cultivés":
One has to be:
        Parisien
        cultivé
and to speak a
        convesation soignée.
So I didn't come that far. Last summer I did a project in the Hainaut
region (with rather Picard local dialects). People over there thought to
localise me as from the Liège area, not from Limburg, nor from Paris. (I
guess I "sing" in French as Liège people, as well as Limburgish people do)

Anyhow, I kept the books (full of comments) we used in the course (newer
editions may be on the shelves nowadays):
- Pierre Fouché, Traité de Prononciation française, 1959, Paris,
Klincksieck, 529 pp.
- Léon Warnant, Dictionnaire de la Prononciation française, 2e édition,
1964, Gembloux, Duculot, xliii + 414 pp.
- Léon Warnant, Dictionnaire de la Prononciation française, Tome II, noms
propres, 1966, Gembloux, Duculot, xxxvii + 236 pp.

Regards,
Roger
r.thijs at ieee.org

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