Pilote Tempête
11th May 2014, 17:25
From http://www.sf-fandom.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?34705-Phonetic-Distortionism:
An especially bizarre case of science fraud and herd mentality is the universal view in phonetics which does not want to recognize 4 sounds of French and 3 of Portuguese. This is worse than geocentrism and the flat earth idea because at least they had some semblance of reality.
The sounds ignored are the short a as in the English pan in the North American accent (mostly as the French letter a, but sometimes e as in femme, etc.), the e as in the English pen (mostly as the French letter e), the i as in the English pin (mostly as é, -er, and -ez), and the u as in the English pun (the French letter o of many words).
A test for frequency and position of native French speakers uttering, for instance, chat and chatte, would undoubtedly prove by measurement that the 2 vowels are different, and that they are as we identify them, and the same goes for the other vowels, and for Portuguese, too--something phoneticists will always refuse to do, of course.
If you don't know French you can check it out at the Univ. de Picardie website, where they give the phonetic transcription and audio examples (type "u de picardie prononciation", and click French Pronunciation and then "old pronunciation guide"). The proper pronunciation in audio examples is also given in the Ask Oxford website and can also be found in any spoken or sung native French on You Tube, etc. Also, any audio course for learning French will have the correct sounds, as apparently people do learn it properly, so the official practice naturally contradicts this, too.
The "a" in French as a rule, when without a circumflex, and at the beginning or in the middle of a word, is like the "a" in the English pan, and the IPA symbol for this sound is the ash, a ligated "ae," taken from the Old English (e.g., vallé, avec, à, alouette, face, place, bateau, montagne, Avignon, Cannes, Caroline, Catherine, Gall, Paris, Laval, balle, bague, quatre, -ac, -aque, -al(e), -ation, -able, -ane, -ateur, -atoire, -ade); at the end of a word it is like the a in about.
The "a" as in the English "pan" and the French ``panne``is a low front vowel and is represented by the /a/ symbol of the IPA, but this is as in the French "pas" and English ``about," which is a long a but not as long as the "a" of the English pawn and the circumflex "a" of the French château. The "é" as in the English pin, is a high front vowel, and must be represented by an iota in the IPA system but this isn't done. The "o" as in "comme, époque," etc., is a mid central vowel, and must be represented by an inverted v in the IPA, which is not done. The 1st "e" of the French "escapade" and the English ``pen`` is a mid front vowel, and must be represented by an epsilon in the IPA, which is not done either. The English pronunciation of Montreal is similar to the French only in the m and l.
This shameful practice seemed to be of recent origin and I thought it was, but I discovered that it goes way back as it is in the Linguistique et Ethnologie chapter of Ethnologie Générale, published in '68, in the Encyclopédie de la Pléiade series, which includes the U. of Paris from 1928 which does the same thing. It was based on a modification by R.P.W. Schmidt of Lepsius, which goes back to the 1800s (German Das allgemeine linguistische Alphabet, C. R. Lepsius, 1855 (English translation, 1863) and was for African languages. Beginner's French by Victor Emmanuel from 1866 (archive.org) had much the same problem. The IPA was founded in 1886 chiefly by French linguist Paul Passy, who believed in simplicity in phonetic notation, apparently at the expense of accuracy. It is unclear if Passy adopted the practice but he apparently did and it is unknown who exactly originated it.
There were some phoneticists in the 1800s, however, who had some kind of competence and honesty. In Grammaire générale et historique de la langue française, vol. 1 (books-google), p. 3, from 1856, Prosper Poitevin distinguishes between the short a as in bal and patte and the long a as in pas and pâte, between the short e as in bonté and the long e as in accès, the short i as in lit and the long as in gite, and the short o as in homme and the long as in dôme. Of course, the è in accès is short, and the i in lit is long in both Canadian and European French.
In 1891, Arsène Darmeteter, Ernest Muret, and Lèopold Sudre, in Cours de grammaire historique de la langue française (archive.org), on p. 61 in the chapter titled Théorie des voyelles françaises, distinguished between differences in timbre (open and closed) and duration in French vowels and seemed to have gotten most of it right.
The English translation/edition of Lepsius (Standard Alphabet for reducing unwritten languages and foreign graphic systems to a uniform orthography in European letters-archive.org) from 1863, in a table on p. 52, clearly designates the a of mal as a short a, which he transcribes as ă.
The Abbé Rousselot and Fauste Laclotte in 1902 (archive.org-Précis de prononciation française) do recognize the French a as either neutral, front, or back, and the front one is the short a as in the French panne and the English pan. And in the Revue des parlers populaires- Alphabet phonétique (archive.org), Gillieron and Rousselot (who invented one of the Romanist alphabets in 1887 and which is used by Darmeteter et al, the other being the Boehmer-Bourciez from 1875) acknowledge the short a of French. Unfortunately, however, the lower front a (/a/ in the IPA) and the lower central a (a with a diaresis in the IPA) are not usually distinguished by linguists in their infinite "wisdom," so that there is confusion between the 2, so that Gillieron and Rousselot may not actually be recognizing the upper front a (ligated ae in the IPA).
George Mason U. had an IPA chart for French which included the ash saying, "these are the sounds found in most French native dialects" and that there are other sounds (besides the ones on its chart).(French IPA-classweb.gmu.edu; unfortunately the site or article is no longer there but I have the print-out).
In Portuguese, the a as in the English pan, and sometimes the e as in the English pen, and the i as in the English pin, are ignored in phonetic transcriptions and descriptions. They are included in the Collins Gem Portuguese-English English-Portuguese Dictionary (1964/1972) by N.J. Lamb, where it says, "(a) short a as in 'patted, lap' ", "(e) as in 'bet, gem' ", and "(i) as in 'bit' ".
The short a sound (æ in the IPA) also occurs in Finnish, Brule Spanish (of Ascension Parish in Louisiana), Quecha, Danish, and Norwegian.
Whether the mispresentation is the reason for the mispronunciation the "a" of French by Anglophones is unclear. An accent is understandable, but certainly all of these sounds are common in English, too, but not the syllable stress, but this latter does not affect the pronuciation of the French "a", so there is no reason to mispronounce it.
No reason has ever been given for this bizarre and laughable practice. I have contacted 4 linguists on the matter and 2 responded but did not answer the question and 2 did not respond at all; one that responded said the sounds weren't represented that way, but when I pointed it out to her she stopped responding.
I have trouble believing phoneticists are so unimaginably incompetent they are unable to tell the difference between the vowels in the French chat and chatte, for example, and not able to see the exact similarity between the a of the French chatte and the English chat, or the é and the English i in pin, for instance. Ruhlen (Guide to the World's Languages, vol. 1, 1991, p. 47) states that the early scholars (speaking of the 19th century) were notoriously poor phoneticists and gives the example of Grimm, known also for his fairy tales, who thought the German word Schrift contained 8 sounds when, of course, it contains only 5. However, such incompetence was not only in the past as some of them mistake the last 2 a's in Canada in the English pronunciation, which are like the a in about, for the French e as in "le"!
I also have trouble believing it is due to some kind of mental disorder like dislexia, as one would think it would be identified and wouldn't be so widespread.
It could be a combination of petty prejudice against English (as the sounds in question are also English but which is also contempt for French and Portuguese, since it grossly misrepresents them) and uppety and stuffy academics wanting to simplify, dumb down, and standardize after the Italian-Spanish model where the sounds are uniform, bearing no resemblance to how French and Portuguese are actually spoken in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere. In other words, all the sounds ignored and/or denied occur also in English and do not occur in Spanish nor Italian, so the vowel sounds recognized for French and Portuguese occur only in those languages or also in Spanish and Italian, and sometimes the short e is recognized because it also occurs sometimes in Italian.
So there might be some method to the madness, but, of course, it is still madness and is in total contempt of truth, devoid of all honesty, reason, and logic, and entirely unscientific, and is an inabillity to face even the most fundamental and innocuous realities. It is wierder than any science-fiction or fantasy not just in itself but in its mindless and practically universal acceptance in textbooks, reference books, and on the Internet, as if people were all connected to a single brain and it short-circuited or they were automatons controlled by a glitch-ridden, central machine. It is one of the most bizarre things I've ever encountered or heard of. It should go on Unsolved Mysteries and in Ripley's Believe It or Not.
An especially bizarre case of science fraud and herd mentality is the universal view in phonetics which does not want to recognize 4 sounds of French and 3 of Portuguese. This is worse than geocentrism and the flat earth idea because at least they had some semblance of reality.
The sounds ignored are the short a as in the English pan in the North American accent (mostly as the French letter a, but sometimes e as in femme, etc.), the e as in the English pen (mostly as the French letter e), the i as in the English pin (mostly as é, -er, and -ez), and the u as in the English pun (the French letter o of many words).
A test for frequency and position of native French speakers uttering, for instance, chat and chatte, would undoubtedly prove by measurement that the 2 vowels are different, and that they are as we identify them, and the same goes for the other vowels, and for Portuguese, too--something phoneticists will always refuse to do, of course.
If you don't know French you can check it out at the Univ. de Picardie website, where they give the phonetic transcription and audio examples (type "u de picardie prononciation", and click French Pronunciation and then "old pronunciation guide"). The proper pronunciation in audio examples is also given in the Ask Oxford website and can also be found in any spoken or sung native French on You Tube, etc. Also, any audio course for learning French will have the correct sounds, as apparently people do learn it properly, so the official practice naturally contradicts this, too.
The "a" in French as a rule, when without a circumflex, and at the beginning or in the middle of a word, is like the "a" in the English pan, and the IPA symbol for this sound is the ash, a ligated "ae," taken from the Old English (e.g., vallé, avec, à, alouette, face, place, bateau, montagne, Avignon, Cannes, Caroline, Catherine, Gall, Paris, Laval, balle, bague, quatre, -ac, -aque, -al(e), -ation, -able, -ane, -ateur, -atoire, -ade); at the end of a word it is like the a in about.
The "a" as in the English "pan" and the French ``panne``is a low front vowel and is represented by the /a/ symbol of the IPA, but this is as in the French "pas" and English ``about," which is a long a but not as long as the "a" of the English pawn and the circumflex "a" of the French château. The "é" as in the English pin, is a high front vowel, and must be represented by an iota in the IPA system but this isn't done. The "o" as in "comme, époque," etc., is a mid central vowel, and must be represented by an inverted v in the IPA, which is not done. The 1st "e" of the French "escapade" and the English ``pen`` is a mid front vowel, and must be represented by an epsilon in the IPA, which is not done either. The English pronunciation of Montreal is similar to the French only in the m and l.
This shameful practice seemed to be of recent origin and I thought it was, but I discovered that it goes way back as it is in the Linguistique et Ethnologie chapter of Ethnologie Générale, published in '68, in the Encyclopédie de la Pléiade series, which includes the U. of Paris from 1928 which does the same thing. It was based on a modification by R.P.W. Schmidt of Lepsius, which goes back to the 1800s (German Das allgemeine linguistische Alphabet, C. R. Lepsius, 1855 (English translation, 1863) and was for African languages. Beginner's French by Victor Emmanuel from 1866 (archive.org) had much the same problem. The IPA was founded in 1886 chiefly by French linguist Paul Passy, who believed in simplicity in phonetic notation, apparently at the expense of accuracy. It is unclear if Passy adopted the practice but he apparently did and it is unknown who exactly originated it.
There were some phoneticists in the 1800s, however, who had some kind of competence and honesty. In Grammaire générale et historique de la langue française, vol. 1 (books-google), p. 3, from 1856, Prosper Poitevin distinguishes between the short a as in bal and patte and the long a as in pas and pâte, between the short e as in bonté and the long e as in accès, the short i as in lit and the long as in gite, and the short o as in homme and the long as in dôme. Of course, the è in accès is short, and the i in lit is long in both Canadian and European French.
In 1891, Arsène Darmeteter, Ernest Muret, and Lèopold Sudre, in Cours de grammaire historique de la langue française (archive.org), on p. 61 in the chapter titled Théorie des voyelles françaises, distinguished between differences in timbre (open and closed) and duration in French vowels and seemed to have gotten most of it right.
The English translation/edition of Lepsius (Standard Alphabet for reducing unwritten languages and foreign graphic systems to a uniform orthography in European letters-archive.org) from 1863, in a table on p. 52, clearly designates the a of mal as a short a, which he transcribes as ă.
The Abbé Rousselot and Fauste Laclotte in 1902 (archive.org-Précis de prononciation française) do recognize the French a as either neutral, front, or back, and the front one is the short a as in the French panne and the English pan. And in the Revue des parlers populaires- Alphabet phonétique (archive.org), Gillieron and Rousselot (who invented one of the Romanist alphabets in 1887 and which is used by Darmeteter et al, the other being the Boehmer-Bourciez from 1875) acknowledge the short a of French. Unfortunately, however, the lower front a (/a/ in the IPA) and the lower central a (a with a diaresis in the IPA) are not usually distinguished by linguists in their infinite "wisdom," so that there is confusion between the 2, so that Gillieron and Rousselot may not actually be recognizing the upper front a (ligated ae in the IPA).
George Mason U. had an IPA chart for French which included the ash saying, "these are the sounds found in most French native dialects" and that there are other sounds (besides the ones on its chart).(French IPA-classweb.gmu.edu; unfortunately the site or article is no longer there but I have the print-out).
In Portuguese, the a as in the English pan, and sometimes the e as in the English pen, and the i as in the English pin, are ignored in phonetic transcriptions and descriptions. They are included in the Collins Gem Portuguese-English English-Portuguese Dictionary (1964/1972) by N.J. Lamb, where it says, "(a) short a as in 'patted, lap' ", "(e) as in 'bet, gem' ", and "(i) as in 'bit' ".
The short a sound (æ in the IPA) also occurs in Finnish, Brule Spanish (of Ascension Parish in Louisiana), Quecha, Danish, and Norwegian.
Whether the mispresentation is the reason for the mispronunciation the "a" of French by Anglophones is unclear. An accent is understandable, but certainly all of these sounds are common in English, too, but not the syllable stress, but this latter does not affect the pronuciation of the French "a", so there is no reason to mispronounce it.
No reason has ever been given for this bizarre and laughable practice. I have contacted 4 linguists on the matter and 2 responded but did not answer the question and 2 did not respond at all; one that responded said the sounds weren't represented that way, but when I pointed it out to her she stopped responding.
I have trouble believing phoneticists are so unimaginably incompetent they are unable to tell the difference between the vowels in the French chat and chatte, for example, and not able to see the exact similarity between the a of the French chatte and the English chat, or the é and the English i in pin, for instance. Ruhlen (Guide to the World's Languages, vol. 1, 1991, p. 47) states that the early scholars (speaking of the 19th century) were notoriously poor phoneticists and gives the example of Grimm, known also for his fairy tales, who thought the German word Schrift contained 8 sounds when, of course, it contains only 5. However, such incompetence was not only in the past as some of them mistake the last 2 a's in Canada in the English pronunciation, which are like the a in about, for the French e as in "le"!
I also have trouble believing it is due to some kind of mental disorder like dislexia, as one would think it would be identified and wouldn't be so widespread.
It could be a combination of petty prejudice against English (as the sounds in question are also English but which is also contempt for French and Portuguese, since it grossly misrepresents them) and uppety and stuffy academics wanting to simplify, dumb down, and standardize after the Italian-Spanish model where the sounds are uniform, bearing no resemblance to how French and Portuguese are actually spoken in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere. In other words, all the sounds ignored and/or denied occur also in English and do not occur in Spanish nor Italian, so the vowel sounds recognized for French and Portuguese occur only in those languages or also in Spanish and Italian, and sometimes the short e is recognized because it also occurs sometimes in Italian.
So there might be some method to the madness, but, of course, it is still madness and is in total contempt of truth, devoid of all honesty, reason, and logic, and entirely unscientific, and is an inabillity to face even the most fundamental and innocuous realities. It is wierder than any science-fiction or fantasy not just in itself but in its mindless and practically universal acceptance in textbooks, reference books, and on the Internet, as if people were all connected to a single brain and it short-circuited or they were automatons controlled by a glitch-ridden, central machine. It is one of the most bizarre things I've ever encountered or heard of. It should go on Unsolved Mysteries and in Ripley's Believe It or Not.