I am curious about the pronunciation of the name of the French TV channel Canal+ . Canal+ - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
I don’t know how one handles pronunciation on a forum such as this. Links to audio perhaps or using those little squiggles that the dictionaries use. I would be curious in the French pronunciation and in how Americans would be expected to pronunciation it.
From various visits to France, they pronounce it as “Canalplus” – the words almost kind of run together. (if you’re not familiar with French pronunciation, it’s like “Canalploo”)
I usually say it as can-AL-ploos, with a soft s on the end like the English plus, and more or less as one word.
I’d say it something like that too. It used to advertise a lot, years ago, with that as its name pronounced that way. Saying it like it were English words would make it sound like it was a really big canal.
Here’s a commercialfor Canal+; the narrator says the name at the end of it.
It’s pretty much how I’d pronounce it, though there might be a slightly different stress on the “u” sound between French and Québecois (to my ear, at least). It’s a very minor difference though.
Quite similar to how I’d pronounce it as well. As for the slight difference you’re detecting, are you sure it’s a question of stress? I’d suggest it might be a slight difference in how the phoneme is being realised in European and Canadian French, something like [y] in Europe vs. [ʏ] in America.
Too late to edit the previous post, but I should point out that (as in the commercial mnemosyne linked to) the ‘s’ is audible in “plus”. So Hello Again is wrong about this. As for the ‘u’, we pointed out two slightly different ways to pronounce it, but it’s not a sound that’s found in most standard varieties of English. You can turn it into “oo” and be understood, but that’s not how it’s pronounced.
I was going off memory of visits in southern France; I did watch the commercial and realized that the “s” is voiced. Compared to the ordinary English-language “s” though, it is barely audible.
By the way that commercial was pretty funny 
In fairness, there are cases where the ‘s’ in “plus” isn’t pronounced. Especially in the expression “ne […] plus” meaning “no more”. But when it means “more”, unless I’m forgetting some exception, the ‘s’ can be heard.
Of course – but you really need to have it in your ear to know when to sound the ess and when to not.
FWIW, not a big TV watcher in France, but /caenalplys/ (don’t remember the IPA or care enough to bring out the character map) – that’s the way I always heard it. I guess definitive proof has already been given, hum de dum, just trying to keep the conversation going, is all!
Stress, phoneme, whatever…I ain’t no linguist! All I know is the sound is slightly different, but I’ll defer to you and more knowledgeable Dopers to explain why. 