Sons et lettres: A Pronunciation Method for Intermediate-level French

14 HOMOPHONES In English, identical spellings often represent different sounds (e.g., cough, ouch, through; beat, hear, health), which makes pronunciation uncertain. French has the opposite tendency: different spellings often may represent the same sound. This results in awealth of homophones (words with different spellings that are pronounced the same), such as Pau [city in southwestern France] , peau [skin], and pot [ jar], or cent [100], sans [without], and sang [blood]. Homophones make meaning ambiguous, but they are also a rich source for word play and puns. The factors that facilitated our learning to read and write as children, by their absence, make our experience of French feel foreign : the sounds that don’t exist inour native language, our lackof basic vocabulary, and thedifferent rules used to encode familiar and unfamiliar sounds are obstacles that we must overcome in order to become comfortable reading French words. Fortunately there are keys that can help us surmount these difficulties. First, the French spelling system is much more regular and more reliable than what we are accustomed to in English. To understand this, consider the plight of the French speaker learning English who must learn six pronunciations of the letters ou in order to correctly pronounce common words such as bough , bought, though, through, enough , and could . Each of the vowel sounds represented by ou in these words is different from the others, and there is no apparent pattern to differentiate them, no clear rule to guide us to how they are said; we learned by memorizing each word individually. Now, compare this to the situation of an English speaker learning French, who can depend on the letters ou consistently representing the same vowel sound /u/. Our expectation is that spelling should tell us how to pronounce a word, and in French it usually does! While it is far from absolute, this regularity is surprisingly consistent, and the lessons in Sons et lettres are built upon this fact. Consequently, once the patterns and spelling rules presented here become ingrained, you should be able to apply them in such a way that you can accurately pronounce a large number of familiar and unfamiliar words.