Re: Hiatus within words

En réponse à Roger Mills <romilly@...>:

>
> Presumably in the case of haïr, the dieresis is used to prevent
> misreading
> as "hair" /(h)ER/-- is there such a word? Or ?"hère".
Exactly. There is no word <hair> (but there is <hère>, used nearly only in the
expression "pauvre hère": pitiful man), but the digraph <ai> is very well
established as /E/, so the only way to separate the vowels in it is to write the
<ï> with a trema.

  Is it hiatus or
> diphthong in cases like _nouille_ or the final syllable of _fauteuil_
> (one
> of my favorite Fr. words, which I can barely pronounce) ??  Contrast
> _nuit:
> nouille_ or _huit : oui_.....?
>
Neither hiatus nor real diphtongue. <-ille> and <-il> after a vowel mark the
consonnant sound /j/. So it can be considered as diphtongue but I generally take
it as a vowel followed by /j/ (thus "nouille": /nuj/ and "fauteuil": /fo't9j/).
As for your examples of contrast, in the first one it's /nHi/: /nuj/ (/H/ is
turned-h in IPA), while the second one is /Hi/: /wi/.

Christophe.