posted by Charles H. Russo on Jul 21
Serrurerie. A locksmith’s shop. I pass it every day. I can say the word locksmith just fine…in English, that is. En francais, I’m fluent enough that I can even pronounce the word serrure (”lock”) using my hard-earned correct French r. But to say serrurerie? Forget it. It is not happening. It requires too many mellifluous, throaty French r’s in too short a time frame. I practice pronouncing it smoothly. Serru-re-rie. To no avail: every time I try, I find that I’ve barely recuperated from rolling out the first r when the next r and the next r need to come flying out of my tonsils.
I discover this dilemma when innocently asking my proprietaire if there is a locksmith who can make a copy of a key. “Madame, est-ce qu’il y a une serruheuh-hlerie…,” I end up gargling, the pitch of my voice sliding from its habitual soprano to a gutteral baritone in the space of five words.
Apparently I am not alone in this; many Anglophones with decades of practice in phonetics classes, language labs, and even living extensively in France, have triumphantly mastered the French r, but their exhausted epiglottis just comes to a dead halt on serrurerie. Conquering just one French r, of course, is the b?te noire of French majors and their long-suffering professors — so learning to say it three times in rapid succession is the Final Frontier. I am not even near the edge.
>morrrre
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