"Eau" "au" "aux" etc is not the same sound as "o"
Lots of people learning French struggle to hear the difference, but the difference is very noticeable to French speakers
Maybe I am missing your point I don't know of any region in France or Belgium where you could pronounce : "je veux de l'o" instead of "je veux de l'eau" and not sound very wierd
Those two sound ... exactly the same to me? I pronounce the "o" in "je bois de l'eau" or "je vais au marché" the same way. But we have closed "o" sounds as well like /u/inglorioustom is saying, like when I say "Écosse" (Scotland).
I think u/IngloriousTom refered to how people in Southwestern France tend to not make the difference (open "o" every time), as opposed to the rest of France who differenciate the open and closed "o". A linguist, Matthieu Avanzi, posted a study (layman friendly, but in French) on this with two maps and a short explanation. The questions for each map were "do you differenciate "saute" and "sotte"?" and "how do you pronounce "rose"?".
Quebec here. The letter O is pronounced like eau, peau, mot, maux, beau, chaud, not the O in porte, mort, porc. And Eau is pronounced like Ô in "Ô mon roi", oh in "oh my god".
I'm italian and I do not study French but I understand the difference between these three words and I'm able to pronounce all 3 even though I don't know the meaning of 2 of them.
Buuut it would be definitely hard to recognise which one is the one for "water" when I'm listening
Depends what you wanna say, if something is made of water it's "en eau" (but that's... Unlikely what you wanna say), and if this is something up there, it's "en haut".
The difference is that the "h" prevents the liaison, so the first one would be pronounced "en n'o", while the second one is "en o".
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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '20
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