Help talk:IPA/French

"French has no word-level stress" yet "grammatical stress is always on the final full syllable..."

The claim of no word-level stress is contradicted in the French phonology article that the Help links to, where it's made clear that word-level stress exists, and the position is described (albeit, alas, not immediately exemplified): "grammatical stress is always on the final full syllable (syllable with a vowel other than schwa) of a word." --47.32.20.133 (talk) 15:21, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

Word stress exists in French but is always rendered on the last syllable. Thereof, it would be pointless to denote it using IPA as every word always be denoted with a stress on every last syllable. --Bankster (talk) 17:37, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

Last full syllable. That excludes syllables whose nucleus is /ə/. Nardog (talk) 17:41, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

If it were just that, we would still want to denote it in our transcriptions, as we do with contextual allophones that are non-phonemic but also consistent and predictable. We don't indicate stress in French because it's phrase-level, so a word's stress will differ depending on if its position in a phonological phrase.

I mean, if someone doesn't like that reason, I can listen. After all, we tend to indicate transcriptions of words in languages with final-devoicing as if they are pronounced in isolation and we could do the same with French and stress. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 18:18, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

Oi

"oi" is missing. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.91.51.235 (talk) 11:49, 30 October 2019 (UTC)

Guttural R example is wrong

The page claims:

ʁ regarder, nôtre[3] Guttural R, Scottish English loch, but voiced

But the ch sound in loch sounds nothing like a R of any kind. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.97.62.77 (talk) 12:23, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

Voice it and pull it a bit further back in your throat. (Although I wonder if "guttural R" really does sound like an R to monolingual English-speakers.) Double sharp (talk) 09:09, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Some of these seem plain wrong

saut/haut/bureau/chose are said with a sound similar to o as in load/blow/retroactive, however story is said with o as in store/pour/or/oar etc.

pâte seems to be dependent on region but the 'common' pronunciation seems to be a as in bat rather than bra

sort/minimum/hôpital are all listed as sounding like the british off. However, I don't see that those three french words actually use the same vowel sounds. Listening to the the various pronunciations on wiktionary suggest that they are different sounds. sort seems similar to off, but the others sound like different sounds. The sound in minimum sounds more like ə or perhaps œ̃. The sound in hôpital sounds more like o.

I'm posting here for discussion first as I imagine these are pretty subjective.

Source: English native/resident - I don't believe that any of my comments here are affected by regional variations, at least not within the UK.

Stripybadger (talk) 08:36, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

It's kind of difficult to find something perfect for these sounds. The sound of French haut is [o]. We were trying to go with something monophthongal, and the sound of English load is [oʊ in American English, which is at least somewhat close, and [əʊ] in RP, which is pretty off. For some of these other IPA guides, we've done dialect-specific approximations and that may be called for here.

Do you have a source that says as much about pâte? I'm seeing the opposite claim elsewhere around the project, but I didn't notice any citations to see what experts have to say on the matter.

It's not necessarily a good idea to rely on our ears for this sort of thing. It may be one of those dialect-variant kind of things that we then just have to make a choice about (I notice that the wiktionary entry on hôpital lists two different pronunciations. It looks like a few words were added by A11w1ss3nd in this edit. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 17:27, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

The vowel in story is often transcribed with ⟨ɔ⟩, but the actual quality in both RP and GA nowadays is between the cardinal [ɔ] and [o], if not closer to [o]. The vowel in off is /ɒ/ in RP and /ɔ/ in traditional GA, and in cot–caught merging accents it is somewhere in the vicinity of [ɑ~ɒ~ɔ]. The authoritative Trésor de la langue française informatisé transcribes both minimum and hôpital with [ɔ]. There are not many places where pâte is still pronounced differently from patte at least in France, but in those places the vowel in the former is indeed closer to that in bra than in bat. Nardog (talk) 17:42, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

To me it doesn't come to a surprise that the vowel in sort is further back than the last vowel in minimum or the first vowel in hôpital. Though I am more familiar with Belgian than Metropolitan French it seems clear that pre-rhotic vowels are way backer than their allophones in other environments. That has no impact on our (pan-)English equivalents, though. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 19:08, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

I have always seen the French e written with a schwa (inverted e) as here. The entry compares the sound with the English first syllable in "about". But to my ears, the sound has always been closer to the oo in foot. Is it just me? Johnm307 (talk) 16:38, 6 April 2021 (UTC)