Quote:
Originally Posted by RMJ
English does not have French i sound. You cannot pronounce it correctly with English examples.
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RMJ is indeed correct about this. "Lee-Lee" is a approximation, which is close mainly in the respect that it forces a long "e" sound unambiguously, but the long "e" sound of English is not quite the French "i", being both longer in time duration, and also diphthongized at the end (i.e., not "pure"). It's funny, we even learned about that in elementary school, the "a that turns into an e", where the teacher would pronounce the letter "a" (long "a" sound) like "aaaaaaaaaaaa.e.e.e.eeee". That's what has always bothered me about those phrasebook transcriptions like "pahr-lay voo frahn-say?", because it can lead English speakers to end up using their own vowels rather than try to imitate the vowels that are being used in the target language. English vowels are rather odd ducks relative to lots of other languages; almost all diphthongized, not written consistently, etc. There was a joke that the biggest, busiest, most international of all airports, "Heathrow", has a name which has so many sounds peculiar to English that almost any non-native speaker is missing at least one of them in his/her native language.
RMJ's attitude about the whole thing is another story entirely. If he wants to emphasize to everyone his opinions about how America, Americans, and English are not the center of the world, then that's his right, but I think doing it in this manner is not particularly productive.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Killian
I'm not trying to start another argument, I'm just saying that I feel you are being unfair and unhelpful here. It would have been easier to make a constructive statement at the beginning, rather than allow it to erupt into this...
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He's clearly not trying to be easy.