Talk:demi-tasse

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demi-tasse

Two questions:

• I think the pronunciation is wrong. I'm fairly sure that the vowel is /a/, not /ɑ/. Could someone confirm this, please?
• The gloss (or, as it actually was, the definition) said "cup", but which of the English senses is intended? Again, could someone please check and make any necessary changes. — Paul G 15:37, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Re: pronunciation: this appears to be a matter of some debate. The Trésor de langue française informatisé (TLFi) says of tasse:

Prononc. et Orth.: [tɑːs]. Gén. [ɑ] p. anal. avec tas (v. G. STRAKA ds Trav. Ling. Litt. Strasbourg t. 19 n^o 1 1981, p. 215). Mais PASSY 1914 [ɑ] ou [a] et MARTINET-WALTER 1973 6/17 [a]. Att. ds Ac. dep. 1694.

Pronunciation and Spelling: [tɑːs]. Generally [ɑ] by analogy with tas (see [source A]), but [source B] gives [ɑ] or [a] and [source C] gives [a]. Listed in the Academy's dictionary since 1694.

I think we're pretty safe sticking with [ɑ], since most French speakers pronounce [ɑ] as [a] anyway. (I know that sounds — and is — ridiculous, but that's just how it is. "Correct" French distinguishes the two, but most people pronounce both as [a].)

Re: definition: the TLFi gives:

Demi-tasse, subst. fém., vieilli. Tasse plus petite qu'une tasse ordinaire et dans laquelle se sert ordinairement le café à l'eau. L'officier avait devant lui sa demi-tasse, son carafon de cognac (POURRAT, Gaspard, 1931, p. 48).

Demi-tasse, n. f., dated. Cup smaller than an ordinary cup, in which is ordinarily served coffee with water (black coffee?). The officer had in front of him his demi-tasse, his carafe of cognac (POURRAT, Gaspard, 1931, p. 48).

so, both really; TLFi defines it as the cup, but the example sentence clearly means the cup with its contents.

(The above is accessible via http://atilf.atilf.fr/dendien/scripts/fast.exe?mot=tasse; click the middle element in the first row of cells.)

—Ruakh_TALK 16:32, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the great research. I checked for myself last night, and my French-English dictionary (Collins-Robert, 1978) has /tɑs/ as the pronunciation of "tasse", which surprised me a little, but I'm happy to accept that. That dictionary (and other French dictionaries, monolingual and bilingual) I have seen do not lengthen vowel sounds (as, I believe, there are no minimal pairs in French wtih short and long vowels).

I'm aware that French speakers tend to pronounce /ɑ/ as /a/ but, to my ear, "je ne sais pas" is /ʒnəseˈpɑ/ (or /ʃeˈpɑ/ if you prefer ;)). But then I'm a bit of stickler for "correctness" in language.

As for the word itself, it was not in my bilingual dictionary nor my monolingual one (Petit Larousse, 1989).

I'll update the French entry according to the TLFi definition and example. — Paul G 08:32, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Done - rfv tag removed. — Paul G 08:35, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Indeed, vowel length is no longer phonemic in Standard French, but since different words do display different vowel length phonetically (contrast e.g. puce "flea" and pur "pure", and note that the vowel is much longer in the latter), and since some dialects do still display phonemic vowel length to some extent, I think it's potentially quite helpful to indicate such. (I'm not advocating doing so here — too much work for too little gain, I think — but I appreciate that the TLF does it.) Especially since tasse is actually a word that one would not normally expect to have a long vowel; I think the vowel lengthening is a consequence of the tas-influenced shift to /ɑ/, since so far as I know /ɑ/ is always long.

Incidentally, I also try to distinguish /ɑ/ from /a/, but I'm an acknowledged snob in such matters.  :-)

—Ruakh_TALK 18:37, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

The pronunciation—I don't understand

In an English dictionary, isn't the purpose of the phonetic rendering to show how a word, even a foreign borrowing, is pronounced in English? As far as I know, the word is pronounced, in English, /'dɛmitɑs/, stressed on and with ɛ, not ə, in the first syllable. —68.34.101.226 07:02, 22 March 2008 (UTC)