>>You speak the language, I don't.
>
>I thought you spoke EVERY language, including Basque and Sanskrit! :-)
For French, I'd defer to anyone who took any formal training in it - I did not. I've scavenged a lot of it, but that method of learning is sometimes unreliable ;).
>>You're probably closer to the original, so I'd agree on the most, except where you introduce an extraneous -y in the end (as in -ey)
>
>Do you mean as in "Dew-prey"? I meant it was pronounced as in "bird of prey", but I saw you used "eh", which is better, and changed the others to suit, but missed that one. So:
>
>Dew-preh
>
>OTOH,you try pronouncing the soft English "a" (as in make) without an involuntary "y" at the end. You have to trail off with a definite "h".
Soft English a is "ej" in Serbian (we do hear it as two sounds), just like we hear the o as "ou", u as "ju" and i as "aj". But we are speaking about French here - and I don't hear the "j" in any of the words we mentioned. Well, not when the French pronounce them ;).
>>or before the u (-ew) which I never heard in French. They never had the great vowel shift the way you did.
>
>I can't see which you mean!
The French vowels don't coincide with the English for the most part - and it's quite hard to map them, but I'm convinced that additional -j- doesn't exist in French, and doesn't help approximation either.
>Actually, modeliing on your examples I missed the "d" in piedmont. I'm not sure that isn't pronounced, as I've never heard it by a frenchie.
It isn't. If I put it in the "should be" column, my bad. In Serbian, it's "Pijemont". Check
http://www.ndragan.com/langsr/francuski.html - that's where I keep the list.