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

23 Unpronounced Letters in French One of the challenges that written French poses for English speakers is that so many letters which we would pronounce in English words are silent in French. This is especially true of final consonants (treated in the review section on page 30), but it is also true of consonants in other positions, and of vowels in certain contexts. For example, the words conte [tale] , comte [count, as in count Dracula], and compte [account] are homophones (that is, they have the same pronunciation) and neither the final -e nor any of the consonants in om, on , or omp are pronounced, as such. In lesson 9, we will see that the n and m after a vowel both indicate the same thing—namely, that the vowel is nasalized, such that the p in compte has no effect on the pronunciation. For English speakers, for whomthese letters usually represent spoken consonants, accurate French pronunciation requires us to learn to interpret these letters differently than we normally would. This is even more true in the case of final consonants. The consonants at the end of masculine adjectives ( petit ) or high-frequency verb endings ( finis , finit , prend, prends ) do not correspond to our learned habits about these letters in English. We learn to ignore the final consonant of such verb endings when we learn about verb endings in beginning French. This is relatively easy to do in the case of a uniform grammatical pattern (such as regular verb endings), but some patterns are more complex. The ending -ent , for example, is completely silent at the end of a verb ( ils parlent ), but not when it occurs in other word classes such as nouns, adjectives, and adverbs ( accent, transparent, rapidement ). In these cases, -ent represents a vowel sound, but still without a pronounced consonant n or t . We must learn to recognize these different contexts and adapt our pronunciation accordingly. Why is this? Why do French words so often end with unpronounced consonants? For example, why aren’t the singular verb forms for finir all just written fini , since neither the -s of finis nor the -t of finit is pronounced? The short answer, in most cases, is that at an earlier time in the history of the language these endings were pronounced. During the centuries of its evolution from Latin to Old French, the pronunciation of individual words and the systemof sounds as awhole changed, so that some final consonants faded and eventually disappeared fromspeech altogether.While the pronunciations changed, however, the written forms did not change to reflect this evolution. Spelling, because it is written down and encoded in documents and dictionaries, tends to be more durable (one could also say, more conservative), while spoken language features and patterns gradually and naturally evolve and change. If the spelling is not revised to reflect this evolution, then the