Pronouncing Resnais

There's no end to the wonders one can find on these forums...

According to kriege10, who wished to make a big cavalier impression with one big flashy irrational statement, but who ends up looking like a cowboy a**h**e (and I am refraining from adding other generic references): "The French mispronounce everything and don't even give a damn, so don't get a complex about this, but it is pronounced something like "ray-NAY", except the "ay" is really more like the "e" in "red" and the "r" sounds almost like a guttural "h". Anyway, "ray-NAY" is closer than "ruh-NAY"."

OK....Probably from someone who thinks this was funny and surely from somebody who takes for granted that IMdB is his/her US turf, oblivious of the century in which we live and the possibility that a LOT of French-speaking people actually consult IMdB to further their knowledge about Hiroshima mon amour, a French movie made by a French director. This is obviously a movie without frontiers, a movie for the heart and the mind, and it's not because people with a bit of education have learned to laugh healthily about themselves and not to take themselves too seriously that anything goes. It's one thing to keep an open mind, it's another to have some moron thinking he's so funny because some day, somehow, somebody too polite (or too stupid) laughed at a dismally stupid bit about French people heard from some retarded drunk parakeet.

I couldn't help getting a bit angry here. Brain-dead loud mouths will sometimes say something which shouldn't normally affect me (ignoring them being the right attitude to follow). But see, I don't know HIS excuse (no, sorry, women always refrain from sounding THAT stupid socially!) and I don't care for any because there is no choice....

Not amused, nope. Angry, yes, quite a bit. Angry, because having seen the thread’s title, I was about to chime in on that topic (being a francophone teacher, I sure know how to pronounce Resnais and how to help people with that). However, I had a major letdown when I read what a micro-headed fat cretin had written before me. I thought I had read the stupidest things in these forums until this day. Nothing, I say, nothing could possibly be more imbecile than saying that French mispronounce everything, including a name as French as Resnais. Is there any point in trying to show him how totally absurd everything in that sentence is ? “French” might mispronounce languages foreign to their own, just like any other linguistic group will do with other groups. But at least, give us credit for what we do quite well already, and that is speaking French. If only there was at least some decency to be found in some minuscule corner of that stupid internet eructation ... but unfortunately, this gets ugly and clearly xenophobic. “French don’t give a damn”, vomits the Neanderthalian. So gratuitous... does that bozo know that French is spoken by dozens and dozens of countries throughout the world, so that with such an ill-conceived and distasteful remark, he is alienating both citizens of France and those of any French-speaking country? I know that such considerations are beyond this individual’s intellectual grasp and interests, but I’m just trying to illustrate how frustrating it can be to read such submental snappy statements.

Does it stop here? Alas, it does not. Not satisfied with insulting “French people”, our francophobe dares giving his own bad advice on how to pronounce Resnais. As one would expect from the relevance of his remarks so far, it won’t come as a surprise to any of you that his phonetic recommendations are way off the track. I’ll try to rectify things, hoping the damage already done is not too extensive.

Thus, although this person’s pronunciation advice from hell was provided several posts upstream in this thread, I’m posting a kind of erratum at the end of that thread so that it will be read more readily by anybody consulting this topic. It’s easy to pronounce: as confirmed by several lexicons of proper nouns, the consensus is that Resnais is simply pronounced “Rènè”. The “è” is exactly pronounced as the diphthong in read or bread, (and of course, non-francophones must make a special effort with the “R”, which requires compressing the tongue near the palate, like the German and Hebrew also do with that consonant).

Thus, please forget about kriege10’s confusing recommendation. Why write Ray-NAY (which is totally misguiding – the “ay” diphthong does not sound at all like an “è” but like the French “é”! Second, it is completely wrong and irrelevant to indicate a tonic accent on a syllable of an isolated word in French!! There is no such thing as a tonic accent on a given syllable in French: this is an English characteristic, and in French, tonic accents can be put on almost any syllable, the choice being determined by the context of the word in a sentence. And finally, I leave it to our Forrest Gump imitator to explain to us how the French "r" sounds like a "guttural h" to him, because frankly, I will lose both my Latin and my French before I can figure that one out :-)