Actually, I think baladeur *is* nicer than "walkman," and I intend to begin using it forthwith.

You still use a walkman? I thought you had an "eee-Pod."

Baladeur sounds much better than iiii-Pod.

Apple would probably insist on "iBaladeur," though.

What does that little "i" stand for anyway?

I completely agree about the linguistic tyranny from which France now suffers. The silent letters, though, do serve a purpose; the vowels are pronounced in poetry and traditional vocal music, and even the silent consonants play a part in the rhyme scheme of proper French poetry. Details like these exist in any language and should not be lumped together with the neologisms that ordinary French people don't often use anyway. As it happens, "E-mail," or just "mail" sounds perfectly correct in spoken French, and this is what the vast majority of non-bureaucrats call it there.

hat does that little "i" stand for anyway?

The "i" stands (or stood) for "internet" in the original iMac.

Of course, English is actually much more nasal than French-- since nasality isn't used to distinguish meaning in English words, we let our velums flap around all willy-nilly, resulting in plenty of unintentional low-level nasality that we simply aren't aware of.

I'm just sayin'.

English doesn't use nasality to distinguish meaning? Yeah, cause everytime I mean to say "mat" I end up saying "bat". They're the same thing right? How about "nat"? Ooh, and "cannon" and "canyon". Oh, by the way, your velum-bone doesn't have much to do with your nasal-cavity-bone, I assure you. Also, I don't know about your velum, but mine is quite well schooled and would never flap unintentionally. Anyway, if you insist on embarking on some defacement of English-speakers, you might be reminded that speakers of any language tend not to be aware of the underlying representations of the words they use. Unless those speakers are French, of course, because they are so obviously freakishly paranoid about their nasalizations.

Tootle pip!

Perhaps I should have been more specific: nasality is not phonemic in English _vowels_, as it is for French _vowels_. The pair 'bat' and 'mat' shows that it is phonemic for English consonants. 'Cannon' vs. 'canyon' is a place difference: the sound in 'canyon' is palatalized, whereas 'cannon' is alveolar; both are nasals and so do not illustrate anything one way or the other about the issue at hand. Place vs. manner, dear.

And I assure you, your velum has everything to do with the articulation of nasal sounds, be they consonants or vowels. When the velum, also known as the soft palate, is raised to close off the nasal cavity, all air is forced through the oral cavity, resulting in oral sounds. When it is lowered, it can form a closure with the oral cavity, forcing the airflow through the nasal passage. That is precisely the articulatory difference between sounds like d and n. Consult any basic introductory phonetics text like Peter Ladefoged's "A Course in Phonetics" to confirm this. Look for a saggital section diagram and brush up on your vocal tract anatomy.

Any phonetician will also confirm that English vowels are nasalized frequently when they occur near a nasal consonant-- it's a type of assimilation, a common process that happens all over the place, with all sorts of features.

What speakers actually do in the process of articulation need not have anything to do with what they believe themselves to be doing. I nasalize my vowels all over the place, and so do you if you're a native English speaker. Noting an empirically observable fact about articulation should never be construed as anything but that. I don't see how one could disparage English speakers somehow by simply noting a fact about English phonology. Nor do I see how one can accuse the French of being "freakishly paranoid" for observing a phonemic difference that other languages do not. That's just bizarre. I was just noting that phonetically, English has a _lot_ of nasality in it, but we aren't aware of it since nasality is not a feature of vowels that we need to pay attention to to make ourselves understood.

Sheesh.