From Latin > French: Pertinent Information?

[Imperfacundus]

We covered the topic before, but they are indeed in Parisian French.

 

[Pacifica]

Really? Isn't Parisian (i.e. standard) French the model used by Wiktionary?

Because Wiktionary gives the pronunciations I said:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/était
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/été

 

[Pacifica]

And I don't think I've ever heard any others, really.

 

[Imperfacundus]

I mean "popular Parisian (/northern metropolitan French) pronunciation". Wiktionary prefers giving a more conservative one, and only sometimes lists the popular pronunciation where it differs.

For example est, which a lot of people pronounce as é.
Or quelqu'un, although they do cover the alternative one for un.

 

[Pacifica]

un.

LOL the Quebecois pronunciation is really weird.

 

[Imperfacundus]

Yeah... I've still never managed to hold a conversation with a Québécois and this is a good example of why.

 

[Pacifica]

You know (this has been mentioned before) Quebecois movies etc. are subtitled here, because their pronunciation is so different from ours that it's sometimes pretty hard for us to understand. Now it depends; I've heard some Quebecois on TV that I had no trouble understanding, but some others sounded pretty much like they were speaking a foreign tongue.

 

[Iohannes Aurum]

Pacifica

How about son son (his/its sound)?

 

[Pacifica]

Twice the same sound.

There's worse:

Ton tonton.

And even worse:

Ton tonton tond.

And even much worse:

Ton tonton tond ton thon.

(Yes, Etaoin, I know, you're sobbing in a corner because French is such a horrible language etc. etc.)

 

[Serenus]

Exhibit A: the month of August. It's a fairly substantial word in Latin, with three syllables, four consonants, two simple vowels and a luxury diphthong to crown it all. It's not difficult to see how augustus could turn into agosto or agost or even gustar; one could imagine any number of other changes, such as the G turning into a Dutch-style voiced guttural, or the S dropping out – S drops out a lot. But it's impossible to imagine that by any natural process francophones would have decided to drop everything from the word and turn it into nothing more than an exclamation. Mind you, they did the same with aqua, but there was less to drop. There are dark forces at work here.

Lol, yes, such spectacular reducings make you wonder how it's possible.

What are some other examples of such spectacular phonological reduction in French? Off the top of my head I can think of īnsula > île [il] and aetātem (with the suffix -āticum: *aetāt(āt)icum) > âge [aʒ] (ëé, without the suffix, is attested in Old French).

The participles crēditum > *crēdūtum > cru [kʁy], dēbitum > *dēbūtum > dû [dy], vīsum > *vidūtum > vu [vy], lectum > *legūtum > lu [ly], *bibūtum > bu [by], *sapūtum > su [sy], *potūtum > pu [py], and habitum > *habūtum > eu [y] are fairly interesting too.

 

[Imperfacundus]

One of my favourite examples is souhaitaient /swɛ.tɛ/

 

[Etaoin Shrdlu]

For sheer effrontery it's hard to beat août. It goes well with eau and eu.

 

[Serenus]

ecce hīc iacet > ci-gît [si.ʒi]

 

[Imperfacundus]

Duodecim - > /duz/

 

[Pacifica]

Well, tons of words have been reduced, but what is the minimum degree of reduction to interest you? Can you express that in, say, a number of lost syllables? Are you interested only in words that are monosyllabic in French?

 

[Serenus]

Whatever you find interesting; I'm not really strict about this. Souhaitaient and ci-gît were good non-monosyllabic examples.

 

[Pacifica]

Well, not sure how interesting these are, but:

ministerium > métier (5 to 2 syllables, or 3 at most if you want to over-articulate "métier" poetically)
oculum > œil (3 to 1 + rather weird sounds coming out of the blue)
digitum > doigt (3 to 1)
colaphum > coup (3 to 1)
avunculum > oncle (4 to 1 or 2 in very articulate speech)
viridem --> vert (3 to 1)
...

 

[Pacifica]

Oh, and, somehow, aller came out of ambulare.

 

[interprete]

Well, not sure how interesting these are, but:

ministerium > métier (5 to 2 syllables, or 3 at most if you want to over-articulate "métier" poetically)
oculum > œil (3 to 1 + rather weird sounds coming out of the blue)
digitum > doigt (3 to 1)
colaphum > coup (3 to 1)
avunculum > oncle (4 to 1 or 2 in very articulate speech)
viridem --> vert (3 to 1)
...

benedictus / benoît ?

 

[Imperfacundus]

Viridiarium > verger.