[Opinions] Re: Wdyt: French feminine combined names
by Elinor (guest)
9/29/2004, 11:15 AM
I'm not sure about a lot of the pronunciations you gave ... The very exaggerated last syllable is not actually the French way, but an English-speaking (normally American) rendering. In English, as you'll know of course, we stress the first syllable more often than not. The French balance stress between the syllables of words. In a name like Nathalie, stress is balanced equally amongst the three syllable: na-ta-lee. A good way of mastering this is to imagine Na, ta and lee were three separate words in a list. To English ears, this sounds as if the last syllable is being stressed, simply because it is more stressed than it would be in English.
With a lot of French words, though, the Brits simply stress the first syllable as they naturally would: We say KA-fay for "café", while the Americans say "ka-FAY". And nobody is any correct-er than anybody else, because as I said, in French the stress is equally shared. But in some of these cases, the name just sounds far too stressed on the last syllable, in a way that it just would not be in French at all. For Marie-Jeanne, for example, the French don't say ma-REE ZHAN but something more like "Marizhan", pronounced quickly and softly.
As for the names ... I really love Marie-Isabelle :-)