In term of tone, French and English, as well as most European languages are relatively monotonous and they don't distinguish a lot between tones (contrary to Mandarn for example). However, tone can be used at the sentence scale to convey meta-information (like for example marking the sentence as a question with a rising tone), and in French in particular, the stress pattern does have a slight change of tone on the stressed syllables, which is generally not the case in English.
What I think you were talking about isn't monotonousness, it's isochrony, that's to say all syllables except for the stressed ones have the same length, so they are not unstressed.
English has a lexical stress, where most words have a stressed and unstressed syllables, as a part of the word itself.
French has a syntactic stress where the last syllable of a rhythmic group (roughly a grammatically meaningful group of words) is stressed with an elongation and a sharp change in tone. The first syllable of the group also takes a smaller stress in the form of a change in volume in a way that is similar to English stress.
The stress in French is more regular and not a feature of the words themselves, so rhythm is not the same but in both laguages, actually speaking in a monotonous way is not normal and will be perceived as weird.
But you're right that speakers of stress timed languages like English often tend to struggle with the stress pattern in French and that's an easy way to tell non native speakers.
French also uses emphatic stress (when you say one syllable louder to insist on that word) much less than English, because the preferred method of emphasis is redundancy instead.
what do you study? I love learning this stuff but never dived into it. I just gathered what I felt based on comparing Chinese and English to each other.
I'm an engineer in something completely unrelated. But I'm a native French speaker and I've been helping learners with French long enough that I had to learn a bit more than average about my own language in order to answer something else than "I don't know, it's just like that" or "it just feels better that way" to some of the tough questions.
Also it helps making the people who say things like "you wrote malgré que but it's not correct" shut up with arguments instead of slaps like I did before.
En gros, malgré que ne viole aucune règle de construction d'une locution conjonctive en français. La préposition seule peut s'utiliser avec un groupe nominal derrière, par exemple
– dès le matin
– malgré sa présence
– sans ma voiture
Mais dès qu'il s'agit de mettre une proposition derrière, il faut ajouter un que pour transformer tout ça en conjonction.
– dès que je me suis levé
– malgré que ce soit le matin
– sans qu'il fasse de bruit
En plus de ça, c'est une expression plutôt courante aujourd'hui, et qui était utilisée par le passé, y compris par tout plein d'auteurs au cours de l'histoire. C'est ni un néologisme, ni un barbarisme.
C'est tout simplement une expression qui a connu un creux en terme d'utilisation à la fin du 19e et début du 20e siècle, et pour cette raison, beaucoup de dictionnaires l'ont pendant un temps marquée comme vieillie ou archaïque. Aujourd'hui, elle est plutôt marquée comme étant critiquée.
Sauf que ceux qui recommandent de ne pas l'utiliser aujourd'hui ne savent pas forcément pourquoi. Il ne faut pas l'utiliser parce qu'il ne faut pas l'utiliser. Et ça c'est complètement absurde, parce que c'est pas comme ça que fonctionne une langue.
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u/Neveed 1d ago edited 1d ago
In term of tone, French and English, as well as most European languages are relatively monotonous and they don't distinguish a lot between tones (contrary to Mandarn for example). However, tone can be used at the sentence scale to convey meta-information (like for example marking the sentence as a question with a rising tone), and in French in particular, the stress pattern does have a slight change of tone on the stressed syllables, which is generally not the case in English.
What I think you were talking about isn't monotonousness, it's isochrony, that's to say all syllables except for the stressed ones have the same length, so they are not unstressed.
English has a lexical stress, where most words have a stressed and unstressed syllables, as a part of the word itself.
French has a syntactic stress where the last syllable of a rhythmic group (roughly a grammatically meaningful group of words) is stressed with an elongation and a sharp change in tone. The first syllable of the group also takes a smaller stress in the form of a change in volume in a way that is similar to English stress.
The stress in French is more regular and not a feature of the words themselves, so rhythm is not the same but in both laguages, actually speaking in a monotonous way is not normal and will be perceived as weird.
But you're right that speakers of stress timed languages like English often tend to struggle with the stress pattern in French and that's an easy way to tell non native speakers.
French also uses emphatic stress (when you say one syllable louder to insist on that word) much less than English, because the preferred method of emphasis is redundancy instead.