Sounding the 'l'

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Permalink Reply by Pamela Kingfisher on September 15, 2009 at 3:23pm

Ok now you are getting into phonetiques. In English we have a lot of dipthongs, where vowells actually have more than one sound. In French there aren't many. For example the word "bean" would sound completely different pronounced with French rules, and they would probably put an accent on the E to make it pronouncable!
the word fille is written phonetically [fij] and it sounds like fee with a tiny uh at the end...
You could say the double l sounds more like a y sound in English....
This is a whole semester course at ecole to learn all the rules.....I am learnig them now. It's grueling, because just like in English there are exceptions to every rule.
Pam

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on September 15, 2009 at 4:42pm

Note that phonetically, [j] is a [i] vowel that:
(a) is pronounced with the airflow more constricted;
(b) does not occupy the centre of a syllable.

There's no "uh" as such.

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Permalink Reply by Frank on September 15, 2009 at 3:34pm

Hello Jim,

I think it sounds like Kooyong's Y only when "LL" comes up after the character "I". And it sounds like the "L" in "tell" the rest of the time.
But there are exceptions, though, like the word for 1000: "mille" (sounds like a real L here, probably because a former spelling was "mil").

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on September 15, 2009 at 4:34pm

Yes, -ill- usually has a [j] ("y") sound, and -ll- is pronounced [l] when not preceded by -i-.

In some cases, the preceding i actually represents a genuine [i] vowel, as in briller [bri.je]. In other cases, the i is simply inserted in the spelling after another vowel, e.g. veiller [ve.je] or [vE.je] -- see how in the phonetics there's no [i] vowel as such with this one.

There are a small number of cases where -ill is pronounced [il]. The most common are:
- the words mille and ville and derived words (millésime, village, millier, million etc)
- the prefix milli- (as in millimètre, millilitre, millivolt etc)
- the adjective tranquille and derived words (tranquillement, tranquilliser etc)
- the verb distiller and related words (distillation, distillat etc)
- the verb osciller and related words (oscillation etc)

Note that occasionally, fairly unusual words such as osciller, villosités can fox even native speakers who aren't familiar with the word.

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Permalink Reply by Jim Warby on September 16, 2009 at 2:49pm

Thanks all. I had hoped that there was a simple rule which always applied. I should have known that like English there are always exceptions
Jim W

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