Introduction

The object of this chapter is to compare the vowel systems of French and English, to identify the pronunciation problems that a native speaker of English may in principle encounter in the production of French vowels, and to propose a number of remedies to resolve these difficulties. In the next chapter, we shall focus on two specific aspects of French phonetics, vowel length and the distribution of mid and open vowels. Questions relating to nasal vowels and the so-called ‘mute e’ will be treated later, in two separate chapters (Chapters 5 and 6).

Stress and rhythm

Before we draw up an inventory of French and English vowels and embark on a detailed contrastive study, a few preliminary remarks are necessary concerning stress and rhythm in the two languages, because the fundamental differences separating English and French in this area are the source of a number of traits characterizing an English pronunciation of French and a French pronunciation of English.

By stress (‘accent’) is meant the effect of relative prominence that distinguishes one syllable as salient in relation to others. For example, in the English word photographer, the second syllable is stressed, the other three are not: phoTOgrapher. In the corresponding French word photographe, the last pronounced syllable is stressed, the other two are not: photoGRAPHe (the final e is not pronounced).

This book is an introduction to French phonetics addressed primarily to English speakers who wish to improve their pronunciation of French systematically. Since a contrastive phonetic study of English and French finds a natural place in such a manual, French speakers learning English will also be able to glean useful elements for a better understanding and a more effective correction of pronunciation errors characteristic of a French accent in English.

This manual can be viewed concurrently as an initiation to general phonetics and as an opening to French phonology. As such, it is also addressed to those who are interested in language in general and French in particular, and who wish to familiarize themselves with the study of the production and function of sounds. My goal here is to establish, for readers without previous linguistic background, a bridge allowing them to approach with greater facility more detailed and more technical works on French phonetics and phonology.

Special note to English-speaking students learning French

For English-speaking students learning French, the goal of this manual is two-fold: first, to provide them with a theoretical perspective on the sound system of French, especially in contrast with the English system; and secondly, to guide them in as practical a manner as possible through the development of a better pronunciation of French. These two aspects, theoretical and practical, are closely linked.

Introduction

This chapter is devoted to the three French glides, [j, Ч, w] (miette [mjεt] ‘crumb’, muette [mЧεt] ‘mute’, mouette [mwεt] ‘seagull’). In particular, we shall focus on how the glides are represented in the orthography, on their distributional properties and their functional relation with the closed vowels [i, y, u], and on remedies for the pronunciation difficulties that the existence of [Ч] often creates for English-speaking students.

The front rounded glide [Ч]

There are two glides in English, [j] (yes [jεs]) and [w] (we [wi]). When learning French, then, the English speaker must learn to produce a third: [Ч]. The goal of this section is to facilitate the acquisition of this sound.

As already mentioned in Chapter 2, p. 30, [j] is the front unrounded glide that corresponds to the closed front unrounded vowel [i], [Ч] is the front rounded glide that corresponds to the closed front rounded vowel [y], and [w] is the back rounded glide that corresponds to the closed back rounded vowel [u] (see Table 7.1). Given these correspondences, it is not surprising to find, in connection with the existence of the glide [Ч], pronunciation problems similar to those due to the existence of the vowel [y] (see Chapter 3, p. 42), i.e. an inadequate pronunciation of [Ч] and in particular some confusion between [Ч] and [w].

Introduction

We said in Chapter 3 (p. 34) that contrary to vowels in English, vowels in standard French are not reduced and always preserve their full quality. As we shall see in this chapter, there actually exists an important case of vowel reduction in French, but it affects only one particular vowel under certain well-defined conditions. In addition, when this vowel is reduced, it is reduced to nothing: it completely disappears from the pronunciation. Otherwise, it appears as a full-fledged vowel, namely [œ]. The word petit ‘small’ may thus be pronounced [pœti] or [pti], depending on the context. This exceptional vowel is known under many names, among others: mute e (‘e muet’), feminine e (‘e féminine’), unstable e (‘e instable’), fleeting e (‘e caduc’), and schwa. Here we shall simply speak of e, since the vowel whose behavior we wish to study is generally written this way in French orthography.

Since orthography, rather than sounds, constitutes our strategic point of departure in this chapter, and since e is used in French orthography with many different values, it is necessary to define precisely the specific category of e which concerns us here. Briefly, it consists of the es which occur between two consonants or at the end of a word, and which correspond to the sound [œ] when they are pronounced. The words in Table 6.1 contain examples of relevant es.

Introduction

This chapter is devoted to a comparative survey of the French and English consonantal systems, and to an examination of the most important articulatory differences between phonetically close consonants in these systems. The fundamentally distinct properties of l and r in the two languages warrant a separate chapter for these two consonants (Chapter 9). In Chapter 10, we shall consider questions internal to French regarding the pronunciation of double consonants and final consonants. Finally, in Chapter 11, we shall examine the phenomenon of liaison, which was already touched on in the discussion of nasal vowels in Chapter 5.

Consonant inventories and comparative overview

Tables 8.1–2 present the consonant inventories of French and English, together with the main articulatory parameters necessary to their description, with examples.

As these tables indicate, English uses a slightly larger consonant inventory than French: there are 22 consonants in English, compared to 17 in French. The stop systems closely resemble each other; however, the nasal series differ in that English has the velar [ŋ], whereas French has the palatal [ŋ]. The existence of the velar nasal [ŋ] in English does not create great difficulties for French speakers learning English. As a matter of fact, this consonant tends to enter into the French consonantal system; thus, some speakers use it in the ending -ing often found in words borrowed from English (see the first group of examples in Table 8.3), as well as in pseudo-borrowings (see the second group of examples).

The following principles summarize the fundamental practical rules of pronunciation that native speakers of English should strive to follow if they wish to speak French with a minimum of a foreign accent. [The numbers in square brackets refer to the chapters and pages in the text where these questions are discussed.]

1. Pronounce each syllable with approximately equal stress. Maintain for each vowel a full, unreduced quality. [3.33–5]

2. Do not diphthongize vowels; maintain a constant quality during their entire production. [3.39–42]

3. Distinguish between the front rounded vowels and the back rounded vowels, especially between [y] (tu) and [u] (tout). [3.42–3]

4. In the production of rounded vowels, project the lips forward while rounding them well. [3.43–5]

5. Avoid nasalizing oral vowels before nasal consonants. [5.69–73]

6. Do not aspirate the voiceless stops [p, t, k]. [8.129–30]

7. Be sure to produce a clear l in all instances; pay especially close attention to the pronunciation of l in syllable-final position. [9.137–9]

8. Be sure to produce a back r; pay especially close attention to the pronunciation of r after a vowel and before a consonant. [9.142–6]

Introduction

In the languages of the world, there exists a great variety of sounds collectively called liquids, with two subcategories (the l-type and the r-type). From one language to another, the sounds in each of the two subcategories may be extremely different phonetically, as is the case for the French and English rs. In addition, in a given language, more than one kind of l or r may be found; such phonetic distinctions may correspond to meaning distinctions, as is the case for the two kinds of r which are found in Spanish pero ‘but’ and perro ‘dog’. They may also simply depend on the phonetic context, as is the case for the two kinds of l which appear in the speech of many English speakers (compare, for example, the initial l in leave and the final l in veal). Finally, the phonetic differences may be dialectal variations or, for a given speaker, free variations, as is the case for certain kinds of r in French.

This chapter is mainly concerned with explaining and resolving the difficulties which the sounds l and r pose for English speakers learning French, but at the same time it offers an overview of the main varieties of l and r which are commonly found in the languages of the world.

l, r, and syllabicity

Before considering the articulatory differences which separate the consonants l and r in English and in French, it is appropriate to note the distinct functional roles which these consonants can play with respect to syllabification in the two languages.

H-aspiré words can be roughly described as words which phonetically begin with a vowel, but behave as if they began with a consonant. Thus, as Table E.1 illustrates, regular vowel-initial words allow elision and liaison, but h-aspiré words do not (just like consonant-initial words).

Regular vowel-initial words also require the use of special forms for some determiners and adjectives occurring immediately before them. For example, the masculine noun arbre must be used with cet ‘this’ (and not ce), with vieil ‘old’ and bel ‘beautiful’ (and not vieux or beau), and the feminine noun arme ‘weapon’ must be used with son ‘his/her’ (and not sa): cet arbre, ce vieil arbre, ce bel arbre, son arme (compare with consonant-initial nouns like the masculine tapis and the feminine table ‘table’: ce tapis, ce vieux tapis, ce beau tapis; sa table). Here too, h-aspiré words behave like consonant-initial words, as the masculine héros and the feminine hache ‘axe’ show in the following examples: ce héros, ce vieux héros, ce beau héros; sa hache.

Table E.2 presents a list of relatively common h-aspiré words divided for convenience into parts of speech.

Note that derivatives of h-aspiré words are generally h-aspiré words themselves: for example, hautain and hauteur are h-aspiré words, like haut; hacher and hachoir ‘grinder’ are h-aspiré words, like hache. Notable exceptions to this general principle are the derivatives of the word héros, which are not h-aspiré words: cf. l'héroïne ‘the heroine’, l'héroïsme ‘heroism’.

In addition to the letters of the alphabet, French orthography makes use of diacritic marks, i.e. special signs which can be combined with certain letters of the alphabet to form additional graphic symbols. There are five of these diacritic marks: the cedilla (‘la cédille’), the acute accent (‘l'accent aigu’), the grave accent (‘l'accent grave’), the circumflex accent (‘l'accent circonflexe’), and the diaeresis (‘le tréma’). Letters with diacritic marks do not have a special entry in the dictionary. Diacritic marks are usually omitted with capital letters.

Introduction

The preceding chapters dealt mainly with the study of the articulation of the sounds (or segments) which make up words in French and in English. But an utterance in any language does not simply consist of a succession of various articulations. Loudness and pitch are other parameters which inherently enter into the pronunciation of every utterance, and their own modulations play extremely important linguistic roles. Because variations in loudness and pitch are superimposed upon the spoken chain of sounds (or segmental chain), the term suprasegmentals (‘traits suprasegmentaux’) is used to refer to the linguistic manifestations of these particular parameters. The same concepts are also designated by the term ‘prosody’ (‘la prosodie’), a word borrowed from poetics.

Two specific cases of suprasegmental phenomena were mentioned in previous chapters. In Chapter 2 (Section 2.3.2), we spoke briefly of intonation (‘l'intonation’). Recall that intonation is determined by pitch variations (which are themselves dependent on the rate of vibration of the vocal cords), and that such pitch variations give sentences various melodic profiles which allow, for instance, to distinguish between a declarative sentence such as Le petit chat est mort ‘The little cat is dead’ (with a descending intonation) and a question made up of the same sequence of sounds, but with a rising intonation (Le petit chat est mort? ‘Is the little cat dead?’). There is a multitude of possible intonation variations that natural languages can use to express a multitude of nuances of meaning which go well beyond the expression of simple declarative sentences or questions.

Writing systems in the languages of the world differ in what basic linguistic units are represented by the basic symbols of the systems. For instance, Chinese characters typically represent words and Japanese characters syllables. In alphabetical writing systems, sounds are the basic linguistic units represented by the letters of the various alphabets (e.g. the Latin alphabet in English and French, the Greek alphabet in Greek, the Cyrillic alphabet in Russian), and in each case a specific code can be said to determine the correspondences between sounds and letters. In the simplest type of code, sounds and letters would stand in one-to-one correspondences, as they do in the International Phonetic Association's system, where, for instance, the symbol i exclusively represents the sound [i] and only the sound [i], and the symbol y the sound [y] and only the sound [y]. Languages rarely use such a simple code, but their deviations from it can vary widely. French (with English) is one of the languages where the deviation is most extraordinary, and where in fact knowledge of the code is in itself insufficient to allow one to spell according to the norm.

Introduction

The preceding two chapters were essentially devoted to the articulatory differences separating English and French consonants. In this chapter and the next one, we shall focus on some specific properties of French regarding the presence or absence of pronounced consonants in certain contexts. This chapter is concerned with the relation between pronunciation and spelling as far as double consonants and final consonants are concerned when words are produced in isolation. The next chapter deals with liaison, that is, roughly speaking, the question of the pronunciation of word-final consonants when words are strung together in phrases and sentences.

Double consonants

In this section, we shall first consider the question of the pronunciation of double consonant-letters. We shall see that this type of spelling corresponds to a double pronunciation of the consonant only in relatively rare and very specific cases. Secondly, we shall survey the cases (also well defined) where a double consonant is found in the pronunciation, but without any indication of such a pronunciation in the orthography.

The pronunciation of the double consonants of the orthography

French orthography comprises numerous cases of double consonants; the following examples illustrate the possible doublings: abbé ‘abbot’, occuper ‘to occupy’, addition ‘addition’, affectueux ‘affectionate’, aggraver ‘to aggravate’, coller ‘to glue’, hommage ‘homage’, année ‘year’, apporter ‘to bring’, arrêt ‘stop’, assez ‘enough’, attaque ‘attack’, jazz ‘jazz’.