So, «au-dessus» and «au-dessous».

For all ye French-incapable anglos, the first of these words means “on top” and the second means “underneath”. As you can see, there is only a single letter that distinguishes the two on an orthographic level, and if we only use sounds that make intuitive sense to anglos, they would both have to be rendered into phonetic English in the same way: oh dessoo.

There is, in fact, a difference in how the two are pronounced, but it is too subtle for anglophones to pick up unless they are familiar with languages that train their speakers to hear such a difference. This is definitely something that contributes to my frustration about these two words in particular. As far as ai can recall, during the entire nine years that some or most of my education took place in French, no one ever informed me that, to pronounce the sound that corresponds to the letter-yu [u, U] by itself in French, you must purse your lips as if you’re about to say ooooo, then leave your lips in that position while otherwise using your mouth parts (mostly your tongue) to try to make the sound eeeee.

This isn’t a sound that gets produced in English very much, or at least not in the varieties of English that we speak in these parts. It’s a sound that an anglophone with average hearing ability can recognize and distinguish from other sounds, like any other sound, but unless we have been specifically trained to do so, we don’t – and such a training isn’t a part of our normal language acquisition. As a result, whenever we hear a sound like this, we are likely to lump it in with other sounds that we are trained to hear.

Bit of a tangent here: when ai was in university, ai took a Putonghua (i.e. standard Mandarin Chinese) class, and ai learned on the very first day of that class that Putonghua has six distinct vowels. In pinyin, they correspond with the characters Aa, Ee, Ii, Oo, Uu, and Üü. My professor – again, on the very first day – explained that the one with the umlaut there is pronounced by having your lips make an ooooo but having your tongue make an eeeee. She must have said it in about as many words as that. Ai was able to pronounce this sound well enough by my second class, and ai think that this was also true for my anglophone classmates in general (because there was a native Korean speaker, a native Dzongkha speaker, and possibly a few other non-anglophones in the class as well).

The approach of my Putonghua professor should be compared and contrasted to how ai learned French in middle school and high school. Although ai had been taking “Core French” since Grade Three, it’s in Grade Six that ai was taken out of New Brunswick’s standard English curriculum and put into the province’s French immersion curriculum for anglos. What this means is that, at ten years old, after a decade of speaking only English with my unilingual parents and siblings and living in an overwhelmingly anglophone community (there were more kids in my high school that spoke German with their parents than there were kids who spoke French), ai was now going to have four out of five classes a day in French. There are all sorts of problems to this approach, but one major problem is that ai was well past the point where my brain might be plastic enough for me to pick up on, by myself, the subtle difference between the sounds designated as Uu and Üü in pinyin.

In other words, ai could not distinguish between that sound, as in «au-dessus» (or «but» or «rue»), and the sound in «au-dessous» (or «bout» or «roux»). To me, it all just corresponded with the sound that exists in English words like “moon”, “true”, and “cool”. That’s where ai was at – and unless someone was going to call my attention to the difference and provide concrete tips about how to improve my pronunciation, such as by telling me where my tongue should be if ai want to pronounce the Üü sound correctly – that’s where ai was going to stay. This isn’t something that any of my French teachers, neither the anglophones nor the francophones, seem to have understood.

It’s only in the summer of 2013 (almost four years into my Montréal life) that ai finally learned the difference. Ai was having breakfast with some franco buddies and talking shit about their mother tongue, as ai am wont to do, and ai brought up «au-dessus» and «au-dessous», two words that baffled me completely. “How do you know the difference unless it’s written down?” ai asked. They explained the shit with the tongues. They subsequently explained that whenever ai had thought ai was talking about “the streets” (as ai am also wont to do), ai had actually been talking about “the red-headed men”. And it is during this conversation that ai realized ai already knew about this sound, that ai could already pronounce it because ai had shown up for day one of Putonghua class. This actually seemed to surprise them a bit, since they were telling me and the other anglo having breakfast that “it’s okay, we understand you, you don’t have that sound in English.”

You would think, though, that now that ai have been enlightened as to the difference in pronunciation, these words would no longer bother me as much as they used to? Well, you would be wrong! These words are still unnecessarily similar, and there isn’t even a reason that makes any intuitive sense. That is because, while the more basic word for “under” is «sous», the more basic word for «on» is “sur”. It isn’t «sus» with a letter-ess [s, S], but «sur» with a letter-arr [r, R]. So why isn’t the word «au-dessur»? Even if your tongue is as clumsy and anglo as it can be, even if no one has told you how to pronounce the French letter-yu correctly (or the French letter-arr, for that matter), «au-dessur» would at least allow you to answer clearly, in as good a French as you can muster, a two-possible-answers question as to which sex position you prefer.

Let’s imagine a person who can’t pronounce the letter-yu or the letter-arr in French. Let’s name this person Anglo Pete. Here is his phonetically rendered answer to the sex position question: «Je préfaire le sexe au-dessoure!» It’s pretty poor, no doubt, but it meets the requirements for comprehensibility.

Now ai’m not saying that «au-dessus» needs to be changed to «au-dessur». It’s just that this particular convention seems like something that is designed to be difficult for anglophones, and as an anglo, ai just don’t appreciate it. This comes out of my belief that French should be easier for non-francophones, including anglos, to learn.

Final story: the day after ai learned the difference between «au-dessous» and «au-dessus», ai felt like ai had become aware of a great secret, something that granted me strange new powers and/or prestige. Drunk as if under the influence of the Ring to Rule Them All, ai told three anglos whose minds were also blown, including one who grew up in Québec but went to English-language schools his whole life. The whole thing was just crazy. The fourth anglo ai told was not very impressed, perhaps because he had actually been in a French-language school since kindergarten, so ai think ai stopped then. Truly my life will be the stuff of folk tales someday.