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In "the grandchildren," though, I think you would form a liaison, so it would be pronounced as I showed it above, lape-TEEZ-aw-FAW.
If I'm wrong on the liaison, a native French speaker may well be along to correct me.
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I'm not French, so I will likely be corrected, but I'd say something like lape-TEEZ-aw-FAW if "grandchildren" ended a statement. It's more complicated if "grandchildren" comes in the middle of a sentence, because the options are not to pronounce the final "s" (of "enfants"), to pronounce it as an "s," or to pronounce it as a "z." It depends on what word follows "grandchildren."4
The "s" on petits would be silent if you said "the little ones," les petits. I'd pronounce it lape-TEE.In "the grandchildren," though, I think you would form a liaison, so it would be pronounced as I showed it above, lape-TEEZ-aw-FAW.
If I'm wrong on the liaison, a native French speaker may well be along to correct me.
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However in the case of the famous French (formerly Belgian) mathematician, Jacques Tits, all four letters of his surname are pronounced.14
Re variations in pronunciation: I was traveling by train from Paris to Rome by train, and a young French couple were sharing the compartment with me. The young man introduced the young woman as "ma mouche," if I'm not mistaken, and only smiled when I didn't understand. My guess is that they weren't married and that the word meant something more than "fly." In any event, I couldn't understand the very first question the young woman asked me, and when two tries failed to make clear what she wanted to know, she asked, very slowly, "Jusqu'où allez vous?" I don't know if she had asked the same exact question before, but at a normal pace, or if it was her accent. She said it was her accent; she was from Marseille.
