Talk:French words and phrases

Phonetic spelling problems

These have to be the least helpful phonetic spellings I've seen in a long time. I don't speak French, and with the given phonetic spellings, I doubt I would pronounce these words properly.

I at least can count to 10 in French, so I know how those are really pronounced, but the pronunciations I would infer from what's written here are way off. In fact, they're so far off from how I believe the French word to be pronounced that I would not only say this page is unhelpful, but that it conveys false information. For example, 6 rhymes with "fleece", not with "mice", and 9 is not two syllables.

For example, spelling the syllable "enne" as "enne" is only begging the question, though I suppose it would be pronounced "en". Remember, you're not spelling these words for French speakers, who after all already know how to pronounce all of them, but for English speakers.

Don't use "c" in phonetic spelling. From English intuition, I would pronounce "canne" with a hard c and short a, like the word "can", and "cenne" with a soft c, like "sen". But "ameri-sen" doesn't sound right, and I think "canne" is supposed to be "kahn". In fact, I'm willing to bet that a lot of these a's are in fact an "ah" sound, not the short a of "cat", which English speakers will assume by default.

"di" is ambiguous; I'd pronounce it "dee", but I'm almost certain that "dih" was meant.

"sese" would be pronounced like "cease" or maybe "seize", by analogy to other long-e words.

"jze" bears no resemblance to English orthography at all. The sound you're looking for is spelled "zh", not "jz".

Yes, trying to give unambiguous pronunciations to English speakers is difficult and ugly, but given that it seems to be most of the point of this article, you should at least try.

RSpeer 23:18, Oct 19, 2004 (UTC)

See: Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation. Hyacinth (talk) 20:46, 30 November 2013 (UTC)