French: demeurer

GeneralAymeric de Poyen6

Hello,

In a transcription she sent me, my mother wrote the verb demeurer as: dem(blend)-r-e.

I’ve never heard of a dem blend in DJS (only din, daine), but this made me wonder why in DJS it is written d-e-m-eu-r-e while:

-it starts with de which, granted, is not dé, but is still written without an e-circle in derechef, dessus, dessous, so why insert the circle here?

-eur is supposed to be reduced to a simple r?

Thanks!


Previous post:
Next post:
6 comments Add yours

  1. In Simplified: dem blend-oo hook-r-e. Maybe she learned French Simplified. It doesn't matter, you can read it, right?

    SME inserted the circle in d-e-m more than likely for legibility sake, since the blend does not exist.

  2. Your mother’s way is very personal…
    In Sénécal, ‘demeurer’ is written ‘dem-eu-r’ (the infinitive ending is not written).
    The ‘eur’ sound reduced to a ‘r’ is used in mostly in endings like ‘bonheur’, ‘malheur’… The ‘r’ as an ending is also used for ‘-ure’ like ‘nature’…

  3. Thank you Carlos and Christine. I wasn’t asking this to determine what series my mother learned but really to understand the logic behind d-e-m-eu-r-e.

    Since -ure- is often reduced to R within words, I was simply wondering why it’s not the case for -eur- in demeurer.

    Regarding de-, I think I got my answer perusing the DJS dictionary where dem is systematically written with the circle, so maybe demeurer is written like this because of the M. Please correct me if I got it wrong.

    Thanks!

    1. -ure- is often reduced to R within nouns, yes but correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think it's the case in verbs… I don't think I met that in Sénécal, anyway…

    2. Again, another word that you have to see the English outline to understand what happened. In English Anniversary, "demeure" is written dem blend-e-oo hook-r, so Pr. Sénécal adopted dem blend-oo hook-r for French. In English Simplified, the e-oo hook part was removed, so it became dem blend-r. However, SME never updated the outline for some reason, so it remained dem blend-oo hook-r in French Simplified and later series. I would write it as your mom does: with the blend and without the hook.

Leave a Reply