17
That's certainly:
Chères clientes, chers clients ! (Dear customers)
The expression is not specific to Switzerland.
16
Look up "phrase-final vowel devoicing" for scientific articles on the subject.
It's a relatively recent phenomenon in European French, whereby the vocal folds stop vibrating halfway through a vowel at the end of an utterance. Since the tongue is still articulating the vowel and air continues streaming out of the mouth, this produce a fricative. As you've ...
16
As far as most French grammar books are concerned, this form of double ethical dative doesn't exist.
However, the reality is that it is definitely understood by native French and still used in colloquial spoken French. It can also be found in forums/blogs where the syntax is "relaxed".
Here is the first paragraph of an article about it - Je vais te ...
16
I suggest :
Oh, comme ça.
Oh, juste comme ça.
A possibly cheekier, less idiomatic translation would be :
Oh, parce que.
Bah, parce que.
15
La question du « pourquoi » une langue a telle ou telle caractéristique me semble un peu vaine. En dehors des décisions qui relèveraient d'une instance désirant contrôler la langue utilisée par les sujets qu'elle gouverne et interdirait ou imposerait telle ou telle tournure grammaticale ou lexicale, une langue évolue, en général très lentement, et sous le ...
14
Indeed, "ne" can always be omitted in spoken French ("ne ... que", "ne ... jamais", ...).
If you are trying to speak or write in a formal way however, I would recommend never to omit it in an official document1.
When spoken, it is also usual to shorten it, just pronouncing the N (a sort of a contraction). When speaking formally, "Je n'suis pas d'accord." ...
13
I think those are the closest translations:
« Elle/Il va le faire ! » - She/He's going to do it!
« Elle/Il va y arriver ! » - She/He's going to do it!
« Elle/Il peut le faire ! » - She/He can do it!
Those idioms are often used by commentators, sometimes followed by:
« Elle/Il l'a fait !! » - She/He's done it!!
13
No, standard French does not have the vowel /ɪ/ (near-close front unrounded vowel), which is the English “short i”. The vowel which is normally written with the letter I in French is a close front unrounded vowel, API symbol /i/. Its realization [i] is fairly stable across French speakers, at least in Europe.¹ Some Canadian speakers do pronounce [ɪ] in ...
answered May 21 '19 at 19:59
Gilles 'SO nous est hostile'
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12
Essentially, by intonation and pauses. For “80, 16”, one would say:
Quatre-vingt. [pause] Seize.
with a rising intonation at the end of “80”, whereas for “96”, one would say:
Quatre-vingt-seize.
in one go, with a rising intonation at the end of “96” (or falling if at the end of a list or sentence).
12
That kind of "quoi" is what is called a discourse marker, a particule intended to convey a speaker's attitude to the conversation, or to signal something to the interlocutor. A few other common discourse markers are "et bien" or "dis donc" (they signal surprise or amazement at the utterance or the situation), "hein" (attracts the attention of your ...
11
I first believed it was trente à, and short for trente à trente. But it's actually written trente-A in official tennis procedures :
Le score
On annonce toujours les points du serveur en premier, sauf pour le jeu décisif.
On annonce le score comme suit :
« Quinze-zéro, zéro-quinze, trente-zéro, zéro-trente, quarante-zéro, zéro-
quarante, quinze-A, quinze-...
11
The French generally spoken in France does not have [ɪ] either phonemically or phonetically, and to my knowledge no variety of French would use it for the first vowel in « s'il vous plait » (though the /l/ often disappears, leaving a shorter first syllable).
To be clear — as you've since acknowledged — the terms "short" and "long" that we ...
11
Dans la conversation courante :
J'ai acheté du lait — euh, du pain.
J'ai acheté du lait — enfin, du pain.
Je veux dire s'emploie aussi volontiers : 'j'ai acheté du lait — euh, je veux dire, du pain.' Il s'utilise tout à fait comme 'I mean' en anglais.
Je ne crois pas qu'il faille employer 'ou alors', parce que cela donne l'impression que le locuteur ...
10
You should always pronounce leading zeros, and indeed say “zéro zéro” whenever a “block” of two digits is made of 0s.
01 47 20 00 01
is pronounced
zéro un, quarante-sept, vingt, zéro zéro, zéro un.
10
In most use cases, there would be no ambiguity. The context will generally rule out the strictly correct option if you talk about prices or actual quantities :
Cette maison coûte un million deux.
Cannot mean but €1.2M in France, same with :
Il y a trois million huit habitants dans cette ville (= 3.8M inhabitants).
Un million un sounds a little odd, un ...
10
Plait-il ? / Plaît-il ? formal, outdated (or nowadays often humorous, ironical or sarcastic)
Pourriez-vous répéter [, s'il vous plait (or plaît)] ? is very formal
Pouvez-vous répéter [, s'il vous plait (or plaît)] ? is formal
Both are more written French than casual spoken one.
As you are asking about idiomatic ways, be prepared to hear, from formal to ...
10
Ferme-la ! (or La ferme !) is very rude although you might be even more rude with Tu vas la fermer ta gueule ! or just Ta gueule !.
Tais-toi ! or Taisez-vous ! is only acceptable if you are talking to kids or to people under your orders, better to add s'il te plait / s'il vous plait to slightly soften the request.
With friends, you might say Camembert (for ...
10
L'explication est clairement indiquée après le texte en question :
qui avait un énorme morceau de patisserie dans la bouche.
Mme Pernelle, dans cette très libre interprétation de l’œuvre originale de Molière (d'où cette scène est absente), prononce difficilement les mots en italique non pas à cause d'un défaut d'élocution mais simplement parce qu'elle a ...
10
Comme l'écrivait déjà Louis Meigret en 1530 :
Nous écrivons un langage qui n'est point en usage, et usons d'une langue qui n'a point
d'écriture en France. Cité par Bernard Cerquiglini, L'accent du souvenir, 1995.
On peut en effet dire, en première approximation, qu'il existe aujourd'hui deux langues françaises, la langue écrite, conservatrice, normée, ...
9
"Moi je" n'est pas forcément à éviter à l'oral. Il peut être indispensable et tout à fait correct. Pensez au dialogue suivant :
Albert dit : "J'adore le chocolat".
Gérard lui répond : "J'adore la vanille".
Dit comme ça, la réponse de Gérard est à limite du malpoli, elle ignore presque totalement l'expression, l'existence des ...
9
Je dirais
Excusez ma prononciation
qui a l'avantage d'être compréhensible, assez soutenu et simple à prononcer, ce qui est plutôt souhaitable pour ce genre de phrases.
9
The correct translation is indeed
Personne n'est arrivé
And as you correctly deducted, "personne" already has a negative meaning so you shouldn't combine it with "pas" (but keeping the ne or in this case n'). If you do so, it's called a double négation. Double negations are usually tricky and therefore used very rarely and most of the time to induct ...
9
Vivant dans le Nord-Est de la France je n'ai jamais entendu un particulier utiliser "feu jaune". Par contre "feu orange" est couramment employé. On parle même d'"orange mûr" quand on passe au moment où le feu change de orange à rouge.
Il semblerait cependant que les textes de lois utilisent feu jaune :
Les feux lumineux réglementant la circulation des ...
9
It's also know as "dative of interest". It's mostly an emphatical marker common in French, but also used as a way to "call in" someone: Regarde-moi ça!, "Look at it!" has an additional "call-out" element to it.
(le ciel t'est tombé sur la tête is a separate construction that is used with inalienable possessions equivalent to and more common than le ciel est ...
9
That comes from a speech habit of the very young in France; it's called "zézayer" or colloquially "zozoter"; it consists in replacing the sounds "je" by the sound "ze". More precisely, it's the defect in pronunciation that consists in substituting the sound "s" to the sound of "ch" and the sound &...
9
Yes, phatic quoi looks absolutely OK in a text. As a general rule of thumb, whatever sounds right in speech will look fine in a text message or online chat.
Examples that would make completely legit text messages:
Donc c'est ma journée et ma soirée, quoi ! (summing up)
Il est parti avant la fin… Il s'est enfui, quoi (rephrasing)
Elle aurait pu nous ...
9
I'm pretty sure this is just some issue with audio editing of this recording. This is obviously an edited track, and it seems the person assembling these bits of audio together just started this bit (containing the answer) a bit too late, accidentally dropping the "pour se" part in the start. Which gets "corrected" in the transcript.
I've ...
8
Il y a deux évolutions de prononciation séparées, là : d'un coté la fusion des consonnes initiales de je et suis ; de l'autre la fusion de la semi-voyelle et de la voyelle de suis.
Le premier phénomène est -comme tu le mentionnes- facile à expliquer : le schwa de je s'élide et le son /ʒ/ devient /ʃ/ par assimilation régressive. Le résultat, ch'suis, débute ...
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