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Thwarted aspirations
For a while now I've been wondering about the existence of [h] in Cajun French. Not h, mind you--all varieties of French have that. (Except creoles, I suppose.) No, an honest-to-goodness h sound like what we have in English. In some cases, it could've been borrowed from English. Even a "native" word like halle could've been reshaped to [hal] under English influence. But what to make of it in words like hache and--particularly--haut?
Then last week, in a discussion of shallow vs. deep orthographies, I came across this extraordinary claim:
This still left one little mystery: the [h] in haut. After all, this is a descendant of Latin altus. A spelling pronunciation is, I think, out of the question, since the populations which preserve it are--historically speaking--notoriously undereducated. Another "parasitic [h]" like in the Missouri French words? No, according to French lexicographers, this peculiarity goes back to the earliest days of French. Quoth the Robert: "du latin altus, croisé avec le francique hôh, mot germanique à l'origine de l'allemand hoch et de l'anglais high." So there you have it: It's a little bastard, just like the French language in general!
Then last week, in a discussion of shallow vs. deep orthographies, I came across this extraordinary claim:
in French...the "h" is no longer an aspirated H as in "la haine" which is mostly pronounced "la aine"; 20 years ago you could heard it pronounced "haine" with an aspirated H by a few educated old people and 40/50 years ago "Haine" was spoken quite often by everyone.It's been quite some time now since I've done any reading on the phonological history of French, but my recollection was that /h/ had been lost from the standard language quite a long time ago--certainly before living memory. A bit of online research turned up this passage from description of Missouri French published in 1941:
So-called Aspirate HI'm not sure where in France the author of the claim above is from, but when I posted this to a discussion in another linguistics forum, a poster from Brittany confirmed that he had friends in their 30s with [h] in these and other words.
As early as the sixteenth century Scaglier considered [h] inelegant because many people gave it, he said, too harsh a pronunciation. [h] disappeared from Standard French some time at the end of the seventeenth century. To-day in France it is heard only on the edge of the Germanic domain and along a part of the Norman coast. In America, it has survived in the province of Quebec, the Maritime provinces, Missouri, and Louisiana, where it is commonly heard in words such as hache [haʃ], haut [ho], haine [hɛn], hetre [hɛːtr], haïr [haiːr]. In Missouri, a parasitic [h] is often prefixed to the pronoun elle and the adverb ensemble, which are then pronounced [hɛl] and [hɑ̃sɑː̃b].
This still left one little mystery: the [h] in haut. After all, this is a descendant of Latin altus. A spelling pronunciation is, I think, out of the question, since the populations which preserve it are--historically speaking--notoriously undereducated. Another "parasitic [h]" like in the Missouri French words? No, according to French lexicographers, this peculiarity goes back to the earliest days of French. Quoth the Robert: "du latin altus, croisé avec le francique hôh, mot germanique à l'origine de l'allemand hoch et de l'anglais high." So there you have it: It's a little bastard, just like the French language in general!
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Oh, another unusual thing is that Breton itself has an accent on the next-to-last syllable, some Breton French speakers don't always accentuate on the last syllable (sometimes even on the first syllable of a two-syllable word). Also, I think that their emphasis wanders around more in general.
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a poster from Brittany confirmed that he had friends in their 30s with [h] in these and other words
I am blown away by this (and your previous commenter), not least because Brittany is an area of France I know quite well and have visited more than a dozen times, but I have NEVER noticed this.
Even more annoying is that I have seven books on French linguistics, including three specifically about pronunciation, and nowhere can I find any discussion of this phenomenon!
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