Scots English has a vowel sound represented as /x/ in words such as loch; so does Welsh in such a word as bach (meaning little), and German in such a word as bach (meaning stream!). Standard English does not use this phoneme – I have started to wonder if this is a legacy of the impact of Norman and French having reduced the more guttural Germanic sounds of OE.
Can anyone enlighten me? Does modern French use the /x/ sound?
So... please, can anyone...?
Well, Maverick, I can't claim more than a couple of years of French in school, but I can tell you I've never heard that sound in French.
So... please, can anyone...?
Well, Sweetie, I was hoping the lovely belMarduk would take this ball and run with it, but until...
Casting my mind back lo these many years to the seven years
I took French, I can say that I feel fairly sure it isn't a common sound. Now whether it does or does not exist at all, I am not equipped to say. The reason I took French is that, to me, it is a liquid sound--the most beautiful
language on the planet, to my ears. So that is why I don't think your hard sound is commonly heard in French.
Mav, Mav, Mav [heavy sigh emoticon]. And [ah the disillusionment] you had all the ladies swooning after reading the "never arriving too quickly" thread. Tsk tsk tsk.
Isn't it always like a man, needin' to be told exactly where the spot is. Sometimes, I tell you, we ladies have to be takin' out the ole magic marker.
English does not use this phoneme
Nor does French Québécois. Perhaps French from France does. They use a different part of the mouth to speak so their intonation is quite different than ours. Many words do not even sound the same.
Voila folks, my post for the day. I am in my peak trade show season so I do not have time to check into the threads at moment however how could I pass up a thread called X marks the spot when I heard about it.
Salut, have fun all. I'll be back soon.
The only French word with a "x" I could find that has a German equivalent is "Aix-la-Chapelle" with German equivalent = "Aachen". The French UK dictionary said flatly that "x" in French is pronounced "ks", no exceptions noted.
But I could not find the pronunciation of "Aix", but looking at the German antecedent, the "x" may have been pronounced in the the beginning. This added after AS corrected me.
Dr Bill's dictionary is adamant: The French UK dictionary said flatly that "x" in French is pronounced "ks", no exceptions noted.
Well, now, I don't hold no truck with no French, but I betcha the x used in plurals (e.g. beaux; bureaux ain't pronounced /X/.
It has been said it is dangerous to assert a negative. I still remember "bijou, caillou, chou, genou, hibou, joujou, pou"
all of which form plural by adding "x" which is not pronounced. Obviously the dictionary was referring to "x" where it is pronounced in a few words. It was not a thing I could copy and paste readily. Thank you AnnaS for setting things straight. I love being taken to the woodshed in a worth cause. Bill
I love being taken to the woodshed in a worth cause
to start: lol'd at AnnaS's thunderbolt
that said, wwh, was this little ambiguity intentional?
Your original surmise may well be correct. There was no such sound in Norman French.
Modern French uses a similar sound, the uvular fricative [X], in final position after a voiceless consonant: e^tre = [EtX], Ypres = [ipX]. This is a positional devoicing of the uvular fricative or roll that is the normal value of French r. That pronunciation replaced the normal rolled [r] starting in, I believe, vaguely, Paris in the late Middle Ages (and spread through France, then into Germany and Denmark).
There was no such sound in Latin, nor in any of its descendants that I can think of, at any time. Several of them were influenced by Germanic invasions: for example, the Franks took over Roman Gaul. But the Frankish language was lost and they adopted the local Gaulish Latin, the precursor of Old French, leaving only a few Germanic words in it as borrowings.
Frankish would certainly have had [h], and presumably also had [x], in the same positions as in OE and German. If I had books by me I might be able to find an example, and then we'd know what had happened to them. But Germanic [x], if it was there, did not survive to the OF (Norman) period. Clearly [h] did, since English borrowings from French pronounce the [h] where it is silent in Modern French.
The [x] was lost in Middle English; perhaps around 1400 in London speech, later in the country. (I'm being very vague here.) You could tell by looking at poetry: at what point did light begin to rhyme as [li:t] rather than [lixt]?
Of course the change never spread fully to Scotland.
[x] has reappeared in contemporary London speech, replacing [k]: so come is [xam], look is [lux], and so on. In many speakers the change is consistent.
Aix in Aix-la-Chapelle and Aix-en-Provence is, I believe, [Eks] in French, and not [E] (or [ei]) the way English speakers usually pronounce it. (Place and personal names often preserve final consonants where common words don't, e.g. Berlioz.)
There is no connexion between the spelling X in Aix, and the phoneticians' symbol [x] for the sound in Bach, which derives from the value of X (chi) in modern Greek. The ancient Greek alphabet added a letter X to its Phoenician inheritance, but it was used in two different ways: in some regions for [kh], which is what prevailed in classical Greek, and has become [x] in modern Greek; but in other regions it was used as [ks], and so borrowed into Etruscan and then Latin.
There has never been a case of any phonetic variation between [kh] and [ks], or between [x] and [ks].
Whoa, Nicholas--a reverential bow: your knowledge is
formidable, she said in modern French.
Parfait, m'sieur - merci beaucoup! Thanks for a spot-on response, NicholasW.
Now, Bel, I've gotta tell you: there are some magic markers that leave an indelible impression
Now, Bel, I've gotta tell you: there are some magic markers that leave an indelible impression [acting on instructions emoticon]So mark me, mav!
[acting on instructions emoticon]
Eeeep...!
Invasion of the bodice snatchers?