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Question for French speakers: are there any phonological adaptations if a clitic pronoun occurs next to an article of the same form? E.g.

Faites-le le plus souvent
faites-le le soir du 23 décembre
Faites-les les lire

as opposed to

faites-le la main ouverte
faites-le la veille
faites-les le lire

I'm curious about this because English seems to have some (weak) constraints about repeating the same phonological word twice in a row. If we do have something like

What did you put on on Saturday?

there may be a tiny pause after the first "on", which isn't needed for

What did you put on last Saturday?

zompist wrote:What did you put on on Saturday?

there may be a tiny pause after the first "on", which isn't needed for

What did you put on last Saturday?

I'm actually more likely to add a pause to:

What did you put on Saturday?

to make it clear on belongs to the phrasal verb and not the prepositional phrase.

zompist wrote:Faites-le le plus souvent
faites-le le soir du 23 décembre
Faites-les les lire

I don't think I do anything special here.

The second le will often be reduced to /l/ with the schwa elided, if the following word starts with a consonant that isn't /l/.

Also, there will often be an intonation break between the verb group faites-le and the rest, so the first le will receive phrasal stress. Thus, your first example will come out as Faites-le l'plus souvent (though I would rather say l'plus souvent possible).

But those are general phenomena: they have nothing to do with the fact that a word get repeated.

Ryusenshi wrote:The second le will often be reduced to /l/ with the schwa elided, if the following word starts with a consonant that isn't /l/.

Except for southern French where the schwa is never elided...

xxx wrote:

Ryusenshi wrote:The second le will often be reduced to /l/ with the schwa elided, if the following word starts with a consonant that isn't /l/.

Except for southern French where the schwa is never elided...

Would that be Occitan influence?

I get the impression now from looking at different langues d'oïl and langues d'oc that the accents when speaking French become more similar to the local language variety e.g. it's Northerners who say <descend> [dəsãd] whereas Southerners say <descendre> [dəsãdʁə]. And in the local language varieties we also see the final consonant deleted or the schwa retained.

the langue d'oc survives only in the accents of those who should have spoken it ...

Not true. Between 100,000 and 800,000 speak it today.

perhaps...
But I lived half a century in the south of France all along the Mediterranean, I do not know any living* person who speaks a language of oc...

(* my my grandparents did...)

Ryusenshi wrote:

zompist wrote:Faites-le le plus souvent
faites-le le soir du 23 décembre
Faites-les les lire

I don't think I do anything special here.

The second le will often be reduced to /l/ with the schwa elided, if the following word starts with a consonant that isn't /l/.

Also, there will often be an intonation break between the verb group faites-le and the rest, so the first le will receive phrasal stress. Thus, your first example will come out as Faites-le l'plus souvent (though I would rather say l'plus souvent possible).

But those are general phenomena: they have nothing to do with the fact that a word get repeated.

Yup. Pretty much the same in Quebec French. There are "illegal" pronoun combinations in French, but awkward pronoun combos are already commons with reflexive constructions ("nous nous envolons") and datives of interest ("Je vais te me les disperser, moi"), so this is nothing new.

Maybe some of the people you talked to in French also speak Oc.

jmcd wrote:

xxx wrote:

Ryusenshi wrote:The second le will often be reduced to /l/ with the schwa elided, if the following word starts with a consonant that isn't /l/.

Except for southern French where the schwa is never elided...

Would that be Occitan influence?

I get the impression now from looking at different langues d'oïl and langues d'oc that the accents when speaking French become more similar to the local language variety e.g. it's Northerners who say <descend> [dəsãd] whereas Southerners say <descendre> [dəsãdʁə]. And in the local language varieties we also see the final consonant deleted or the schwa retained.

Pretty much, yes. Southern French is a textbook case of substrate influence. I'm not very good at this, but I'm pretty sure I say [desãdʁ] (which doesn't fit Occitan phonotactics).

As for the number of speakers, there are no official statistics; and unofficial statistics vary by a factor of ten.
I do know some people who spoke Occitan as kids, and a few who learned some in high school. But yes, to be honest, it's pretty much dead. I don't think you'll really hear Occitan spoken as a daily, living language anywhere in France.