An unjustifiably long and geeky return.

[wwidsith]

From a linguistic point of view, it's really a fascinating time to be in France right now. The whole language seems to be going through a lot of big changes on a basic level, and things like grammar and pronunciation are relatively big issues

Comments

[commonpeople]

Great post! I'm just about to dive back into my french exercise books and I'm the same as you in my previous studies of liaisons. Very useful for me to know where that stands now in general french life.

[wwidsith]

Since you're heading south, you'll probably find things more conservative down there. The southern accent is fascinating in lots of other ways, though!

[commonpeople]

In what ways? Tell me all their secrets!! :-)

[wwidsith]

Well for one thing, in Toulouse they always pronounce those Es at the end of words - so Toulouse sounds like /tuluzə/. But I am no expert, I've only been there once!

[herself_nyc]

So interesting!
And disheartening, since that liaison thing was one I was really good at ….

[wwidsith]

I should say that there are some contexts where you HAVE to liaise, like after les.

But it's all the so-called "optional liaisons" that are disappearing. I wouldn't worry about it though, you'll just sound extra-correct, which for a foreigner is always a much better bet than sounding extra-sloppy.

[herself_nyc]

Oh, I'm not worried. No matter how extra-correct I ever manage to sound in French, I still sound ultra-sloppy.

[ruakh]

> In normal speech nowadays, triggering the subjunctive (which happens after souhaiter que) automatically overrides tense considerations, so that you would usually use what is historically the subjunctive present, J'aurais souhaité qu'il reste.

I don't know if that's quite the best way to explain it. Even in normal speech, the passé du subjonctif functions more or less as a tense (even though it's structured as an aspect); and conversely, even in older forms of French, when the imparfait and plus-de-parfait du subjonctif were in active use, they really followed a sequence-of-tenses of rule rather than indicating the tense of their own clause. For example, one would write « Il demanda que je vinsse demain » ("He asked that I come tomorrow"), even though there's nothing imperfect about tomorrow.

> My French teacher at school still distinguished maître from mettre because of vowel-length: […]

Where was your French teacher from? I didn't learn any contrastive vowel-length distinction in school, and the TLFi gives those words as [mεtʀ̭

[wwidsith]

Yes, of course there was always a sequence-of-tenses thing going on -- but now? Does it really still function more or less as a tense? I never hear it function at all. To me, once you have to use the subjunctive, that is all you need to know. But that's just how I think of it and you're right that it's certainly not a technical analysis.

My teacher was from Nantes. She taught us a few words distinguished by length of /ε/, maitre and mettre was one pair and the other one I remember was tette and tête. No longer true. I think the R diacritic is distinguishing between voiced and unvoiced? Not sure

[ruakh]

I don't really understand your first paragraph. Maybe I didn't express myself well. In older French, you had to ask yourself two questions: (1) what tense was the main clause in? and (2) what tense is this clause in relative to the main clause? The former selected between présent and imparfait (or between passé and plus-que-parfait), and the latter selected between présent and passé (or between imparfait and plus-que-parfait). In current normal French, you no longer ask question #1, but you still ask question #2. "I'm glad y'all came" is « je suis heureux/se que vous soyez venu(e)s », not « je suis heureux/se que vous veniez ».

The reason I balked at "triggering the subjunctive […] automatically overrides tense considerations" is that question #2 seems more like "tense considerations" to me than question #1 does, but I guess I can see it the other way as well.

The /ε/-length stuff is interesting, I'll have to look further into that!

[wwidsith]

Oh yeah that's obviously the case, and you're right I didn't really make that very clear.

[muckefuck]

I have a French colleague who shwa tags in English. So. Annoying. (Though I imagine that's chiefly because she's a repulsive person on several levels; in someone much different, I might even find it endearing.)

[oh_meow]

Like Mark-ah E Smith-ah?

[muckefuck]

Never heard'm speak.