LexisFirst of all,
I designed a T-shirt for Threadless!
PLEASE VOTE 5 + "I'd buy this as a tee"!!! If my design is selected and is printed, I win $2500 and other prizes!!! SPREAD THE WORD!!
As for the linguistic aspect of the design.
"Un, deux, trois, cat (quatre), sank (cinq)."
It's a French-English bilingual wordplay that most everyone should understand. At least I hope.
Cat-quatre and sank-cinq are by no means pure homonyms, but they are close. The cat appears because the final "r" sound in 'quatre' is so light. Q in French is transcribed as [k] as in cat [kat]. Exceptions might be borrowed words. As far as I can tell, a lone vowel never shows up after Q in French. It's always a combination of two (or more?) vowels, as in: quoi [kwa], que [kə], quelle [kel], qui [ki].
A friend made fun of me once for saying "Québec [kebek]" and not "Quebec [kwebek]" in (an English) conversation. Eh heh.
The 'in' in cinq is pronounced as a nasalized [ɛ], which is an open-mid central vowel. Say "eh" as in set [sɛt]. Now say it through your nose. Yeah, you've kind of got it. It should sound nasty. The nasal vowel sounds like the cousin of [æ] in 'sank' [sæŋk] because of the proximity of æ and ɛ and the fact that both are in nasal environments. See the chart below, if my diagram makes any sense. At least you can see how close the tongue placement of the two vowels in question are.
French phonetics is wack.
I thought that maybe French speakers wouldn't buy my Cat Sank pun, but I'm receiving positive feedback in French, so maybe they enjoy this humor, too!
I hope it gets printed! I WANT $2500!!
I love bilingual puns.
Poor kitties.
I designed a T-shirt for Threadless!
PLEASE VOTE 5 + "I'd buy this as a tee"!!! If my design is selected and is printed, I win $2500 and other prizes!!! SPREAD THE WORD!!
As for the linguistic aspect of the design.
"Un, deux, trois, cat (quatre), sank (cinq)."
It's a French-English bilingual wordplay that most everyone should understand. At least I hope.
Cat-quatre and sank-cinq are by no means pure homonyms, but they are close. The cat appears because the final "r" sound in 'quatre' is so light. Q in French is transcribed as [k] as in cat [kat]. Exceptions might be borrowed words. As far as I can tell, a lone vowel never shows up after Q in French. It's always a combination of two (or more?) vowels, as in: quoi [kwa], que [kə], quelle [kel], qui [ki].
A friend made fun of me once for saying "Québec [kebek]" and not "Quebec [kwebek]" in (an English) conversation. Eh heh.
The 'in' in cinq is pronounced as a nasalized [ɛ], which is an open-mid central vowel. Say "eh" as in set [sɛt]. Now say it through your nose. Yeah, you've kind of got it. It should sound nasty. The nasal vowel sounds like the cousin of [æ] in 'sank' [sæŋk] because of the proximity of æ and ɛ and the fact that both are in nasal environments. See the chart below, if my diagram makes any sense. At least you can see how close the tongue placement of the two vowels in question are.
French phonetics is wack.
I thought that maybe French speakers wouldn't buy my Cat Sank pun, but I'm receiving positive feedback in French, so maybe they enjoy this humor, too!
I hope it gets printed! I WANT $2500!!
I love bilingual puns.
Poor kitties.
0
0