French Orthography (Simplified explanation)

Disclaimer: This essay was an edited version of my assignment when I studied in the university. In this essay, all IPA notations which are absent or orthographically different from the reference are deduced from educated guesses. As this is an amateur work, i.e. not a work in the field of linguistics, use it at your own risk. You are nonetheless not recommended to use any random article on the internet as a reference for your academic paper.

The French language is quite well-known for its peculiarities in the spellings of words. The way a word is spelt is not solely reflecting its current pronunciation. In this essay, we will briefly discuss in some aspects about how the development of the French language shaped the modern orthography and led to the discrepancy between the spelling and the modern pronunciation. This essay will include the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Phonemic transcriptions are written within slashes, while phonetic transcriptions are written within square brackets, like: /a/ and [a].

Silent letters

The French language is known for an abundance of unpronounced letters. The silent letters in the French language are not randomly assigned. They are the remnants of the older versions of the language. This essay proposes that the modern spelling of the French language reflects more of its lexical meaning and etymology than how it is actually pronounced.

Letters d, p, s, t, x and z are typically silent at word-final position. The letter h is silent everywhere when it is not part of a digraph.

tard /taʁ/ late (Latin tardus)

coup /ku/ hit (Latin colaphus)

pas /pɑ/ not (Latin passus)

mot /mo/ word (Latin muttum)

deux /dø/ two (Latin duos)

chez /ʃe/ at (Latin casa)

havre /avʁ/ habour (Latin habulum)

(Brachet, 1873)

The bolded letters in the etymologically related forms of the words in the brackets on the right indicate the phonemes represented by the corresponding silent letters in French.

The letter r in the infinitive ending -er, as well as certain words ending with -er, have a silent r.

manger /mɑ̃.ʒe/ to eat (Late Latin manducare)

février /fe.vʁi.je/ February (Latin februarius)

(Brachet, 1873)

The letter l is silent after i in some words.

gentil /ʒɑ̃.ti/ kind, nice, pleasant (Latin gentilis)

fils /fis/ son (Latin filius)

(Brachet, 1873)

Note that the word fils in the singular form has a silent l rather than a silent s. However, the plural form (with identical spelling) is pronounced as /fil/.

The letters m and n at the end of a syllable are typically not pronounced. However, they nasalise the preceding vowel.

faim /fɛ̃/ hunger (Latin fames)

fin /fɛ̃/ end (Latin finis)

(Brachet, 1873)

The letter g is usually silent after nasal vowels. The letter c is also silent sometimes after nasal vowels.

sang /sɑ̃/ blood (Vulgar Latin sanguem)

long /lɔ̃/ long (Latin longus)

blanc /blɑ̃/ white (Old High German blanch)

(Brachet, 1873)

The letters f and c can be rather rarely silent. This is often regarded as irregular. However, these are some examples of them being silent:

clef /kle/ key, clef (Latin clavius)

œufs /ø/ eggs (Latin ovum)

tabac /ta.ba/ tobacco (Spanish tabaco)

estomac /ɛs.tɔ.ma/ stomach (Latin stomachus)

(Brachet, 1873)

Consider the following examples:

aimer /ɛ.me/ to love

aimez /ɛ.me/ you (pl.) love; Love! (imperative pl.)

(tu) aimes /ɛm/ you (sg.) love

(j’)aime /ɛm/ I love

These forms in each example are identical in pronunciation. The difference in spelling only indicates the difference in person, number or mood rather than pronunciation.

See the following examples:

(je/tu) ceins /sɛ̃/ I put on; you (sg.) put on (clothes)

(il/elle) ceint /sɛ̃/ he/she puts on (Latin cingere)

sain /sɛ̃/ healthy (Latin sagimen)

saint /sɛ̃/ saint (Latin sanctus)

sein /sɛ̃/ breast; bosom (Latin sinus)

seing /sɛ̃/ signature (Latin signum)

(Brachet, 1873)

Those are some mostly unrelated words with identical pronunciation and different spellings. They are spelt in such way because the spelling of the French language has not changed much since Old French (ancien français), when the language used to spell words phonetically. The word for “time” or “weather” was once be spelt as tens or tans, while the word for “twenty” was spelt vint (Foerster & Breuer, pp. 263 & 278, 1914). Extra silent letters were added to those words to yield the modern spellings temps and vingt. The original Latin words are tempus and viginti respectively (Foerster & Breuer, 1914, pp. 263 & 278). It shows that one of the reasons to add extra silent letters was that the scholars attempted to reflect the etymologies of the words by changing the spelling.

The artificial etymological spelling was merely one source of the silent letters. From the works of Luquiens (1909), it can be deduced that the final consonants of Old French were often transformed yet remained pronounced up to around year 1100, when word-final /θ/ (from Vulgar Latin or Old French d or t) started to vanish (pp. 42–54). The spelling of Old French had a greater correspondence to its pronunciation at that time, compared to Modern French. The French language has undergone drastic phonetic changes, in which the most final consonants were lost in the spoken language, while the spelling remained mostly unchanged. This gave birth to the silent letters in Modern French.

Vowel digraphs and trigraphs

Modern French is rich in letter combinations. The same phoneme often has several ways of being written. The spelling eau and au have the same phoneme (as well as the actual pronunciation) as ô and o in open syllables (/o/). The redundancy in the use of symbols in Modern French spelling is merely a result of the merging of different phonemes in the historical phonological changes. In Early Old French, the digraph au denoted the diphthong /aw/, which often corresponds to Latin al, in which the l sound was vocalised before a consonant; Old French faus (> Modern French faux) reflected the L-vocalisation from the Vulgar Latin root falsu (Luquiens, 1909, p. 53). The trigraph eau [ə̯aw] as a triphthong on the other hand reflected another L-vocalisation from Vulgar Latin el [ɛl] > Early Old French el [ɛl] > Late Old French eau [ə̯aw], as in VL bellus > EOF bels > LOF beaus (> MF beau) (Luquiens, 1909, p. 59). The examples above show that the difference in spelling once indicated the difference in pronunciation in Old French.

In Modern French, the digraph ai has the same phoneme as è or e in closed syllables (/ɛ/). They as well reflected different pronunciation in Old French. The a sound in front of a nasal, or ac in front of a consonant yielded the diphthong ai [aj] in Early Old French, which later developed into [ɛj] and ultimately a monophthong [ɛ] (with or without nasalisation), while the spelling remained unchanged (Luquiens, 1909, pp. 33, 60, & 62).

The digraph oi denotes the rather counter-intuitive phonemes /wa/. The Old French speakers did not write such a digraph to represent the present-day phoneme. The digraph oi represented a more straightforward phoneme /oj/; the word for “king” was written rei and pronounced [rej] in the 10th century, then it became [roj] and re-spelt as roi in the 13th century; the spelling did not change ever since, but the pronunciation continued to evolve into [roɛ̯] in the 14th century, and [rwɑ] in the 19th century (Vaissière, 1996). It continued to evolved into the present-day pronunciation [ʁwa].

The circumflex

The circumflex (circonflexe) in the French language is a remnant of the past. The diacritic is still is used in the present-day French, even if its purpose might not be known by many.

One of the perceived uses is to distinguish homophones. The word tâche “task” and tache “blot; blotch; spot” have the identical pronunciation [taʃ] in Parisian and Belgian French. The word sûr “sure” and sur “out of” have the identical pronunciation [syʁ] in most French dialects. A French person in this era may have a perception that the circumflex is randomly assigned to one of the homophones which have a different meaning, in order to distinguish one from another. However, this is not likely to be the reality, as the grave accent (accent grave) has already served the purpose (see à and a, où and ou, là and la). It is not necessary to have one extra diacritic for the same purpose.

Consider the etymologies of the following words:

château /ʃɑ.to/ castle (Old French chastel)

forêt /fɔ.ʁɛ/ forest (formerly forest)

hôpital /o.pi.tal/ hospital (formerly hospital)

sûr /syʁ/ sure (formerly seür)

âge /ɑʒ/ age (Old French eage)

(Brachet, 1873)

The existence of a circumflex in a word very often correlates to a lost /s/ or vowel before a hiatus. This however only explains the origin, rather than the purpose, of the circumflex. The purpose of the circumflex was historically to denote long vowels; with the loss of vowel length distinction, it indicates the vowel qualities instead (Catach, 1995). Now the letter è and ê are identical as /ɛ/ in Parisian French, as the vowel length is no longer distinguished. The same case is for u and û, which is pronounced /y/. The phonemes /ɑ/ and /a/ have merged in Parisian and Belgian French and are both realised as [a] (Fagyal et al., 2006, p.31). The pronunciations of the word tâche “task” (/tɑʃ/) and tache “blot; blotch; spot” (/taʃ/) used to be different, but they have only then become homophones in Parisian and Belgian French. Some trace of the use of the circumflex in differentiating vowel qualities can still be seen on the letter o and the digraph eu in present-day French, as in cote “ratings” (/kɔt/) and côte “coast” (/kot/), jeune “young” (/ʒœn/) and jeûne “I fast; he/she fasts” (/ʒøn/).

Conclusion

The peculiarities in the spelling of the French language was not caused by the spelling itself. The spelling reflects more or less accurately how the words were once supposed to be pronounced. As the French language underwent radical natural phonological shifts, while the written language was updated in a much slower pace, the gap between the actual pronunciation and the spelling has widened increasingly as time went on, which eventually shaped what French looks like now.

References

Brachet, A. (1873). An etymological dictionary of the French language. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Catach, N. (Ed.). (1995). Dictionnaire historique de l’orthographe française. Paris: Larousse.

Fagyal, Z., Kibbee, D., & Jenkins, F. (2006). French: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Foerster, W., & Breuer, H. (1914). Wörterbuch zu seinem sämtlichen Werken Kristian von Troyes. Halle a. S.: Niemeyer.

Luquiens, F. B. (1909). An introduction to Old French phonology and morphology. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Vaissière, J. (1996), “From Latin to Modern French: on diachronic changes and synchronic variations”. AIPUK, Arbeitsberichte, Institut für Phonetik und digitale Sprachverarbeitung, Universität Kiel 31 (1996): 61–74.