Hearing JP

[serenity_ca4]

At work today we had a CIA (not the CIA you know) webcast on seg funds and hedging, and turns out the fourth speaker was a francophone.  Now, I don't know much about seg funds, so other than perking up at the occasional Greek letter I could recall from one of my exams, I really couldn't follow much, so instead, I decided to focus on the francophone

Comments

[eliyes]

Re: tempo & emphasis -- in my experience, Francophones speaking English do emphasize, they just don't do it quite where an Anglophone expects, although they frequently try to downplay or even out emphasis in general, like you said, when speaking English so as not to get it wrong. This may be because the rules for emphasis in French are different. I remember in Bon Cop, Bad Cop, the medical examiner commented that it was strange that in English the first syllable of "tattoo" gets more emphasis, when the spelling, with the double letters "tt" and "oo" would make him think that the "ta" should be less emphasized. Of course, he was mostly making fun of the Anglophone cop.

[serenity_ca4]

oh that was a good movie :)

but yeah, that makes sense. When I was listening to him today, I decided that everything seemed very even and stocattic... (which apparently isn't a word, but I'm thinking of that tempo thing in music when everything is sharp and to the point). But that's not even quite the right description.. it's a bit more nuanced than that, isn't it... and actually, the way you put it sounds about right.

[eliyes]

I really liked it. :)

Stacatto. Yeah, I see what you mean. I think it's an impression Anglophones get because we're used to hearing vowels drawn out a particular way, and when it's not done like we're used to it emphasizes the consonants.