[more way off topic comments]
"...some linguists say that those silent letters are not artifacts, but
reflect __phonemes__ (is that the word?) that are still present in the
mental representation of the language..."
--__morphemes__, actually, from a written point of view (you did say
"letters"). They are what's left of the word eroded from Latin and, like
"night" in English, demonstrate (just as you have pointed out) the
word's philology (etymology is somewhat correct, but focuses more on
semantics than the morphemic transformation). Note: I studied Latin,
Greek and Linguistics at Université de Paris X in the late 70s.
Many French nouns, for example, evolve from the accusative (direct
object) singular form in Latin with further erosion, rosam > rose,
templum > temple, calculus > calcule. This also accounts partially for
what others see as French's tendency to accentuate the final syllable of
a word; actually, there isn't really a tonic accent in French (I won't
go into this), but the final of the word was often the penultimate in
Latin, often the part receiving the tonic accent in that language (just
as now in Italian, Spanish, etc.) and therefore could not be lost
without compromising the word itself.
Phonemes are (very) roughly equivalent to syllables and exist at the
oral or phonetic level. French has the peculiarity, more than most other
Western languages in my observation, of its end of word phonemes being
greatly ambiguous due to the erosion from Latin already mentioned.
Hence, it's easier to find rhymes both rich and otherwise in French even
across gender boundaries (whereas Italian and Spanish have kept the o/a
alternance when French erodes both feminine am and masculine um to
silent e). The resulting explosion in "jeux de mots" (puns), so looked
down upon or at least smirked at in English, is inexplicably prized in
French (where it is so much more common in the first place): "Le
_saint_ père, _sain_ de corps et d'esprit, _ceint_ de vertu, couvait le
mal dans son _sein_." (The _holy_ father, while _healthy_ in body and
spirit, and _girded_ with virtue, nourished evil in his _breast_. All
these underlined words are pronounced identically. There's yet another
word or two in French pronounced the same way, but it's been too many
years and I can't seem to conjure them up at the moment.
If Linguistics paid a decent wage, I probably wouldn't be writing C code
for a living.
Is this off-topic or what?
Russ
A.J.Mechelynck wrote:
Yakov Lerner wrote:
On 7/24/06, A.J.Mechelynck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The French have
used accented letters since (IIUC) before Gutenberg invented printing.
While Antonie helps us with bits of history, I thought I'd ask this.
I was on
irc chat, and somehow the issue of French using a lot of "silent"
letters came up.
For example, Peugeot is 7 letters but 4 sounds. I don't speak French,
but
the tendency is there.
Somebody "explained" that in middle ages, literacy was rare, and scribes
were paid by letters written; and scribes would artificially inflate
number of letter.
Does this explanation hold water ? I know that generally in other
languages,
the "silent" letters are artifact of past real sounds that are
preserved due to
conservatism of orthography. Was if different in French ?
Yakov
In the Middle Ages, scribes weren't paid "commercially" (I think):
they were monks and had their share in their convent's table and bed.
Payment was to the convent, maybe by the thickness of the book, maybe
according to the beauty of illustrations (and decorated letters),
maybe according to how long it took to read the story aloud, I don't
rightly know. Or else maybe some copists were attached to some
nobleman's court, and wrote, copied or decorated books in return for
being lodged, fed, clad, and generally cared for. I guess many small
letters wouldn't have fetched very much more than slightly fewer, but
slightly bigger, letters.
French orthography has been largely fixed at some point of the Middle
Ages (12th century?), but French pronunciation, like English
pronunciation, has continued to evolve since then. Just like English
spelling does not reflect the Great Vowel Shift, French spelling still
uses letters that belong in the etymology, ceased to be pronounced at
some point in the past, but reappear in the feminine or in liaison:
un grand monsieur -- no liaison, the d in "grand" is silent
un grand homme -- liaison, the d is sounded [t]
une grande femme -- feminine, before unvoiced consonant, -de is
sounded [t]
une grande maison -- feminine, before voiced consonant, -de is sounded
[d]
elle est grande -- feminine, before pause, [d]
une grand-mère -- compound, frozen before the adjective (from Lat.
"grandis" in both genders) acquired -e in the feminine: no liaison, -d
is silent.
la grandeur -- derived word, with [d] pronounced.
There are many such cases, also e.g. with verbs, or with plurals where
the -s (from the Latin accusative plural) has remained sounded only in
liaison. IIUC, at least some linguists say that those silent letters
are not artifacts, but reflect phonemes (is that the word?) that are
still present in the mental representation of the language, but are
not always pronounced depending on context.
I don't know where the proper name Peugeot came from, but -eu- is the
standard French graphy for a sound unknown in English (except as the
first part of a diphtong in some recent forms of upper-class British
English "long O") but represented in German as ö; the e after the g is
a diacritic, meaning g is pronounced soft before a,o,u; and -ot is a
common diminutive ending where the -t (from, I guess, Latin -otus,
-otum, as in factotum maybe?) used to be pronounced but isn't anymre.
(About -ge- : The spelling of British "gaol" is much more "surprising"
than its French counterpart "geôle" when considering how they are
pronounced respectively.)
Best regards,
Tony.
