I love it when the strip touches upon tiny French things (says the former French professor :-) In case anyone's interested re today's "ensemble" reference, here's a true fact: French is much, MUCH easier to pronounce than English because the emphasis is always on the penultimate (second-to-last syllable). Easy, eh? Now if only Americans would stop saying entrepreNEWER and connoisSEWER, my life would be complete. Short French rule of thumb: NOTHING French *ever* rhymes with SEWER!

--Wendy

Yer fancy words don't scare me none! ;)

Wow, now that you mention it, that actually works. It never occured to me before. GOD, why did my French teacher never tell me that??!

/ãsãbl/

Though my IPA rather sucks. (And why doesn't this forum support it better? I had to cheat.)

Does French have stress? I'm pretty sure John Wells [ucl.ac.uk] touched on that recently (in a discussion of Pres. Sarkozy - that name is Hungarian, though). I'm pretty sure that the closest think to stress in French is 'end weighting' on the sentence level.

Has spoken French somehow remained unaffected by the changes in emphasis position, inflexion, cadence etc that seems to be poisoning common usage of many other languages and in particular spoken English? In English like what she is spoke, the cadence certainly appears to have been modified over the last decade or so (at least among the linguistic chavs) into some bizarre, probably antipodean arrangement where the end of every sentence is uttered on a rising inflection - and hence becomes almost a question! Sort of like Australians? It is really annoying? Chuck another shrimp on the barbie?

a bas les chavs linguistiques!

In *theory,* language operates a certain way, whereas in practice...we all know how that goes. Not to speak for the entire francophone world, but in general, "French" French is not so pure. Much clearer is something like Canadian French, due to its isolation, unique history, etc., which keeps the language far more protected than Euro French. In any case, as with every language, all French has additional stress put on speech, depending on the speaker. But this is the nature of language, and one of the fun things in history is to look back at how people spoke during certain periods, and never do they turn out to be very clear or structured! So we're back to theory vs. practice. As long as nothing rhymes with "sewer," EVER, I'm cool with that.

--Wendy