Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone speaking Swiss.
OK, I buy that. I was really just poking a little fun at the ridiculous closing statements which in English would be “Yours truly,” or “Sincerely,” but is this whole set of formulae, which is why I can’t even write a letter properly without a dictionary/style guide. Maybe it is on the lee-side in French business correspondence, and I accept your correction.
At least my point about stress-timed vs. syllable-timed languages is correct, though! From what I can recall, at any rate.
Why am I hearing 6, rather than 5?
B, Ä, EE, C, O, N
The “A” in “bacon” in my ears is clearly 2 disticnt phonemes (ä+i), as opposed to the “A” in “cat”. Did you discount them by accident, or is the letter A officially considered a single phoneme in English, even when it’s made up of two distinct sounds?
Some English phonemes are diphthongs, as in the example above. The vowel sound in “house” and the vowel sound in “high” are two more examples. In each case, it is a single phoneme realised as a “glide” from one pure vowel to another.
The fact that it’s written as a single letter “a” is irrelevant, as you correctly suspected. The same phoneme can be written as “a_e”, “eig”, “es_e”, “ei”, “ai”, “ay”.
You’re hearing a diphthong. It’s a phoneme composed of two phones.
Entirely possible. I don’t have any idea how to track that down. But contrast:
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Organisation de la Traité de l’Atlantique du Nord
The words are pretty much the same length (one is 2 letters longer); the difference is that English uses attributive nouns to great effect and French doesn’t. Also French insists on more articles than English.
Here’s a question: do some dialects of English tend to be spoken at signifcantly different speeds that others. Someone speaking with a full-on Geordie Accent will often find it quite difficult to make themselves understood outside the North Eats of England, however generally if they slow down their speech it makes it much easier to be understood by say someone form the South of England and also it doesn’t sound like they’re speaking delibrately slowly to Southerners.
People from NYC speak faster than people from the Midwest.
French does use more articles than English, but in your example, the French version of NATO is OTAN, Organisation du traité de l’Atlantique Nord. So there is one fewer article than you expected.