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[Ray Saintonge]

Gerrit Holl wrote:

>>France is hard to govern, as De Gaulle did put it, because it has "as
>>many kinds of cheese as days in the year". Way more than 246, that is.
>>
>>The French say soixante-dix, quatre-vingt and quatre-vingt-dix
>>The Belgians say septante, quatre-vingt and nonante
>>The Swiss say septante, huitante and nonante, some even say octante.
>>They are the only ones who got it straight. (And I am French)
>>    
>>
>What do the Québecois say?
>
They are the same as the French on this issue.

>The worst
>way to write down a pronunciation is by trying to write it phonetically in
>English - you end up with pronunciations that are totally different from the
>way it is actually pronounced. My name is NOT pronounced "Gair-Rid Hole" -
>not even near (see [[en:User:Gerritholl]] for how it is), but I can't think
>of a closer approximation using this "phonetic transcription".
>
No phonetic transcription is ever satisfactory.  Very young Swedish 
children may have never seen a phonetic transcription but they still get 
the pronunciation correctly.  Most of us become so accustomed to our 
ways of pronunciation that we never investigate exactly how we move our 
tongus in the process.  An early exposure to any second language helps 
to ease some of these problems.

Ec