Re: La Garde muert, elle ne se rend pas!

Raymond S. Wise wrote:

Don Phillipson wrote:

"D|Maxxx" <dieta.maxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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may I ask any French-English speaker to give me the proper English
pronunciation of these words: "La Garde muert, elle ne se rend pas!"

"The Guard may die but never surrenders."
The third word is correctly meurt, not muert. This
diphthong vowel has no near equivalent in English.
The word rhymes with beurre.
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)



For those not familiar with French, I'd like to point out that the
vowel in "meurt" is a simple vowel, not a combination sound--that is,
it's not what a phoneticist would consider to be a "diphthong." A
simple vowel represented by two written vowels (or "represented by a
digraph") is sometimes referred to an "improper diphthong."

Don't you think the R has some effect, so that the eu is no longer quite so pure? Actually, off the top of my head, the only eu words without r that I can think of, have a short vowel - perhaps the words with oeux.

--
Rob Bannister
.

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