French Language

Discuss and learn French: French vocabulary, French grammar, French culture etc.

French Vocab Games app for iPhone/iPad French-English dictionary French grammar French vocab/phrases

For the latest updates, follow @FrenchUpdates on Twitter!

This is one spelling of the word mail, meaning e-mail. It's actually a spelling proposed by the Académie Française and so, naturally, is at least one order of magnitude less common than the English spelling.

So what's so special about this word, I hear you cry?

Well, it represents a pronunciation that is extremely rare in French, namely to have the close [e] sound (that's the sound generally represented by an 'e' with an acute accent) in a closed syllable: i.e. one ending in a consonant. (N.B. The word can also pronounced with an open 'e' sound, as in belle; there's actually often variation between these two sounds in French-- for example, the word très can be pronounced with either.)

Usually, an open [e] sound automatically becomes the close variant when some process means that it's moved from an open to a closed syllable. For example, in the word événement, in reality, most speakers nowadays pronounce the second 'e' as though written with a grave accent (évènement). What has caused this is that speakers tend not to pronunce the third 'e', meaning that the 'n' moves on to the end of the second syllable, closing the syllable, and causing the é sound to become an è.

Another process that can cause this 'closing' is apocope, where the end of a word is "chopped off". It's common in forming various instances of French slang. For example, a cigarette known to nuit grave(ment à la santé) becomes a "nuigrav". And so the word après-midi becomes "aprèm". In après, the 'e' can be either open or close (i.e. be pronounced as é or è); but in aprèm, it's necessarily the close variant.

Views: 205

Reply to This

Follow BitterCoffey on Twitter

© 2024   Created by Neil Coffey.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service