05 March 2008

Je ne regrette rien: phonetics

Beyond the voice and the passion of the line in the famous song, typically, I find the linguistics of the song fascinating. So it was great to come upon this posting Language Log: Je ne regrette rien: phonetics and phonology: which draws attention to one of the things I notice, partly because I've been trying to imitate the words as la Piaf sings them: "she sings je ne regrette as something very much like [ʒnʁgʁɛt], although the first two consonants are certainly soft and indistinct".
It's the reason I find Parisian French so hard to understand compared with, say, southern or West African: the Parisian version seems to have a principle of removing schwa as much as possible, often resulting in Piafesque strings of consonants. (And getting the 'light touch' on the consonants is also not easy). I spend loads of processing time working out which consonants belong with which morpheme or word ... clearly I need more practice. That's the reason to look to visiting Paris on Eurostar ...

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"Spend and tax" not "tax and spend"

 I got a response from my MP which got me kind of mad. You'll see why as I reproduce it here. Apologies for the strange changes in types...