On Tue, Jul 25, 2006 at 10:27:58AM EDT, Russell Bateman wrote: > [more way off topic comments] > [...] > 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.
"seing" .. as in "blanc-seing" > > If Linguistics paid a decent wage, I probably wouldn't be writing C > code for a living. > > Is this off-topic or what? > > Russ >
