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

20 ONE SOUND PER GRAPHEME There are only a few cases in which a grapheme is understood to represent two sounds occurring together. In the word moi , for example, the oi represents the sounds /wa/, even though neither o nor i separately stands for /w/ or /a/. Such cases are rare. Normally a grapheme represents a single sound. sounds / O f/ in cough , but in bought it represents only the vowel without the /f/. Despite these inconsistencies, we have learned through training and practice to recognize the symbols as having different values in certain words. Although they no longer pose a problem, they do illustrate both the problematic nature of English spelling and the ambiguous nature of graphemes: a particular letter or combination may represent different sounds in different contexts. (See exercise 1 on page 37, which explores the notion of the grapheme and its sometimes slippery nature.) Just as the same individual graphemes can represent different sounds in English, so it is in French. Consider the words seize [sixteen] and fraise [strawberry] . You probably know that the graphemes ei and ai represent the same vowel sound, and that the graphemes - ze and - se both represent the same consonant /z/, and also that thephrase seize fraises [sixteen strawberries] is a rhyme. Now consider the words peint [painted] and pain [bread]: in this case we have the same letters ei and ai as in seize fraises , but in a different context, followed by the letter n . The letter n redefines the graphemes to include the following consonants ( eint and ain ) and they represent a different sound, a nasal vowel, for which the consonants that follow (- n and - nt ) are silent. While both French and English have graphemes that can represent more than one sound, graphemes in French are significantly more consistent (less ambiguous) than are those in English. The spelling rules presented in each chapter of Sons et lettres will teach you the regular graphemes as well as the occasional irregularities. These rules are a key to learning to pronounce French with accuracy.