Cote D'livore

Marvin A. wrote:

>> Now, said with a Southern French accent, it becomes [cot] << >> The sound I meant is [o:] as in RP or Standard British English.  << Now you're really confusing me.  Are you using IPA, or similar system for transcription?  The letter "c" in the IPA, X-SAMPA, and Kirshenbaum transcription systems is a voiceless palatal plosive, that is only found in Hungarian.  The letter "o" in IPA is the "o" sound in the word "coat" in North Central dialects of NAE--most dialects of England English use a diphthong for the "o" sound.  The vowel that is used to transcribe the "au" in "caught" in RP is not /o:/, but is /ɔː/, the long open-mid back rounded vowel. [cot] (I'm assuming /kot/), would be how someone from Minnesota pronounces the word "coat".  It is not how an RP speaker pronounces the word "cot". The [ ] and / / marks represent IPA or X-SAMPA transcription. I would pronounce "cote d'ivoire" as /kot divwA/.

Except for the , which should indeed be a , I’m using the phonetic symbols I’ve used all my life, as I learnt them 35 years ago from the Oxford Progressive English Course, by A. S. Hornby (EFL/ESL coursebooks have come a long way since then!).  If you replace my ‘o’ in and [o:] with [ ] and [ɔː], it should be less confusing for you.

The French ‘o’ in ‘Côte’ isn’t a diphthong – it rhymes with ‘caught’ in RP.  The Provençals, however, say it as ‘cot’ in RP.