Singing Potatoes
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Tuesday, 9 December 2003
Arrrgh! French!

I just don't get French pronunciation. There are rules, then there are exceptions to the rules, then there are exceptions to the exceptions... and then when you listen to actual French speakers, it seems like they're just making up their own rules as they see fit.

For example, I'm trying to learn the lyrics to Henri Salvador's Mais non, mais non (known to watchers of The Muppet Show as "Muh-nuh muh-nuh"). In the line Je dois fréquenter que les filles de cinquante ans, the word "filles" is pronounced like "fee". But in Lorsque les filles viennent me taquiner, it's pronounced "fee-yuh". The words que les are pronounced like "cleh" in that first line, but immediately afterwards, it's "kah lay".

ARRRRRRRRGH!

Posted by godfrey (link)
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Comments
You're from Connecticut, live in Florida, and wonder why people in same country can pronounce words differently? I guess I need to get you a Jeff Foxworthy tape for X-mas.
Posted by Lunchbox on 9 Dec 2003 14:44
OK, so it just occurred to me that's it's in the same song, but singers 'manoeuvre' words all the time to make them fit.
Posted by Lunchbox on 9 Dec 2003 14:47
No, I'm wondering why one person pronounces the same exact word(s) differently just a few seconds apart! Is filles one syllable or two? Que les, "cleh" or "kah lay"? It's not like it's two different people from two different parts of France using two different French dialects, it's the same guy!

Now, maybe there are some French grammatical rules which explain this. But absent an awareness of such rules, it just seems maddeningly inconsistent.

Posted by Godfrey on 9 Dec 2003 15:01
See, now you're blaming the language for one guy. That's like saying the English can't spell because Shakespeare would spell the same word, like his own name, differently in the same document.
Posted by Lunchbox on 10 Dec 2003 10:11
Actually, you're quite right: Englishmen couldn't spell in Shakespeare's time. The idea of standardized spelling, even for proper names, didn't arise until later.

But back to the original topic, when a language is represented to me as having regular pronunciation rules, and I'm trying to get a handle on how those rules work, I tend to find it frustrating when a native speaker of the language doesn't pronounce it regularly.

You're probably right that syllables were being dropped to make the lyrics scan properly — but
it would be nice if whoever transcribed the lyrics had noted the fact by using apostrophes...

Posted by Godfrey on 10 Dec 2003 10:27
Oui.
Posted by Ginevra on 10 Dec 2003 14:05
Non optimal scantion is a multicultural issue.

Sid
Posted by Sid on 10 Dec 2003 15:20
filles is pronounced "fis" or "fees" according to my French Professor. But she's from Cannes, and they're quirky... Sometimes words get a slightly different pronounciation if they're followed by another word which makes for a whole nother set of rules to worry about. This usually applies to words that end with consonants being followed by a word that starts with a vowel, or visa versa. In this case, I'm not sure if that rule applies at all... I don't speak French well enough to make that judgement call.

Other than that, it could just be that the singer is inserting another syllable to make the word scan. *shrug*

Je ne sais pas.
Posted by Yet Another Sarah on 11 Dec 2003 00:37
See, this is why I like German: everything always gets pronounced the same way every time. You don't have to figure out if letters are or are not pronounced based on the next word, you don't have words that look almost identical but sound completely different (like tough/trough/though/through in English).

Of course, you still have stupid gender rules to contend with (a pencil is masculine, a pen is feminine? A cabbage is feminine, but a young unmarried woman is neuter?!); sometimes you must until the end of a clause wait before you can the main verb of the clause learn; and fighting your way through sixteen-syllable compound words is a bit tedious.

Okay, screw German. Make mine Esperanto!

Posted by Godfrey on 11 Dec 2003 08:06
I thought German was extremely easy to learn thanks to it's similarity to King James' English. I mean, if you understand how to use thee/thou/thy/thine, you're not gonna have much trouble with German. The only thing I didn't get was their tendency to make shit up. If they didn't have a word for something, they'd cram together four or five words that said essentially "ihavenoideawhatthisthingisbutwehavetogiveitaname" and that would become the official term for it. I brought this up with my German roommate at UCSC and she agreed with me that it was pretty weird...

Spanish? More or less the same as French. A little less kooky, granted. I still haven't attempted to learn it, even though everything in California is basically bilingual these days and I'm around people speaking it constantly... Married a second generation speaker, actually.
Posted by Yet Another Sarah on 11 Dec 2003 10:32
To me it's always seemed this way:
French is more particular, and a little harder to learn, but they stick to the rules pretty much,
Italian & Portugese seem a little easier, and a pretty similar, but still not as simple as Spanish seems. I say seems, because I don't know any Spanish, but I seem to be able to pronounce it correctly without having any idea what the words mean.
Posted by Lunchbox on 15 Dec 2003 08:53