Le Robert has become my new friend, and I lie in bed and flip through the pages, checking out the IPA spelling of words, finding out precisely what the phonetic difference is between dessous and dessus. I've also been wondering about how to pronounce words that being with in-. So if it's in + consonant, you get a nasal vowel
as in, vin. French has 4 nasal vowels and you can say them all in the phrase ''un bon vin blanc''.
But back to ''in-''. If it's followed by a vowel, it's not nasal, it's just ''in'' in IPA, which is like ''een'' if you compare it to English I guess. Mystery solved. Thanks Robert!
The whole IPA thing is really useful actually, I wish I had learned it sooner.
Another thing I wish I had learned sooner: liaisons à l'oral. Either no one ever taught me this, or I wasn't paying attention. Basically, if a word ends with a consonant and the next word starts with a vowel, you tie them together. Example, ''les petits enfants'', you would pronounce the ''s'' in ''petits'' (normally it is silent). Oh but you pronounce it like a ''z''. Now that I come to think of it, this is kind of hard to explain and there are a bunch of other weird rules like the ''d'' at the end a word turns into a ''t'' when you do the liaison.
I'm not big on memorizing grammar rules. I like to be told a rule and then pay attention to the pattern in things I read or hear, but if I am asked to articulate what the rule is later on, I've usually forgotten the specifics. I'll just write whatever ''sounds right''. Memorizing rules is all right for some, but grammar is just a means to an end for me, I just want to be understood.
This post is just about as boring as my weekend, which has so far consisted of taking breaks from my translation work to study for my exams. I watched the movie ''Potiche'' last night though. I enjoyed it. On Friday there was a picnic with some of the other students. A few of them are American missionaries and they had another American missionary at the picnic who was visiting. I struck up a conversation with this lady ''What do you think is the best English translation of the Bible?''
''What's your opinion on Jehovah's Witnesses?''
She eventually got that glint in her eye and I knew she was hoping to save me. I tried to tell her about my church back home and how it meant more to me than the Baptist church that I've been going to here. I wrote down the name of my Winnipeg church on the back of a receipt and told her to google it because my Minister puts her sermons online.
I don't really understand the logic in sending American missionaries to France. University is free and they have their incredible sécurité sociale, so the state is looking after the vulnerable, and the people are probably too educated to get converted to American-style Christian fundamentalism.
It's hard for me to have a discussion about religion with anybody though because I really have never looked into it enough to feel that I have any sort of authority to argue any position. What's up with diehard Christians always citing the prophesies in the Bible as being proof that it's the word of God. Is that good proof?
This missionary also chatted with me about evolution, which is NOT a good way to convert me. I told her, my belief in evolution is in no way at odds with an allegorical interpretation of Genesis, but she was all ''it is literally 24 hours per day in the Genesis story''. Even though I suggested that since the Earth wasn't formed there would be a different conception of time. Nope, she was pretty sure that all Evolutionists started with the notion that there was no God and took it from there, so they had faulty reasoning. I pointed out that Darwin was a Christian and didn't publish his results for years because of that. But according the the missionary he lost his faith later on.
But she never directly answered my question: is the devil responsible for carbon dating and fossils?
Sigh. I should get back to work.
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