Il ne reste plus de billets.

English Translation

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Audible or silent ‘s’ in plus?

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I was taught that it is silent when plus is expressing the negative.

To my ear it sounds as though Mathieu is saying “pluz” with a “z” sound (voiced alveolar fricative), and Cecile is saying “plus” with an “s” sound (voiceless alveolar fricative).

So not only are they pronouncing the final “s”, but the pronunciation doesn’t even appear to be consistent between them.

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I’d never heard of this rule before, so I went off to find some further reading on this topic.

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Since the Clozemaster voices are doing such a surprisingly good job in general, it may cause learners to trust the system too much and thus acquire bad habits.

Ideally, I would like a native French-speaking human to go through all sentences and check for strange pronunciations, but in lieu of that we could all flag any dubious case whenever we see one.

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I put this sentence into Microsoft’s Bing Translator, and Google Translate, to see how their text-to-speech systems would cope with it.

Bing Translator pronounced this sentence with a silent “s”.

Google Translate pronounced this with a “z”. That is clearly incorrect, as the “z” sound should only appear due to liaison with a following vowel.

Moreover, I then edited the sentence to say “Il ne reste plus d’argent” to see whether that would make a change to the pronunciation in Google Translate. It did, but in a quite interesting way. On the first click of the megaphone symbol, it pronounced it with a silent “s”. On the second click of the megaphone symbol, it pronounced it with a “z”. Then it went back to silent “s”, then back to “z” etc.

It would appear that the phrase Il ne reste plus de … is rather confusing for some TTS engines !!

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