Talk:French orthography

unexplained symbol

In the "major IPA" columns of many of the charts a symbol that often recurs is 'Ø' (significantly not enclosed in / /'s as most of its counterpart are), an upper-case letter 'O' (or perhaps just an oval shape) with a slash over it. A quick search through various IPA-related articles in Wikipedia and a few external articles failed to turn up any reference to it, although, confusingly, there is an IPA vowel symbol consisting of a lower-case letter 'o' with a slash over it.

It may be that this is intended to represent a "null sound" or no sound at all. In any case if this symbol is to remain in use there needs to be some legend or footnote describing its meaning. Mrnatural (talk) 19:24, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

I believe it's meant for a phonologically null sound. See Zero_(linguistics). 129.120.246.12 (talk) 15:08, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

arguë

"It is also added above the feminine adjectival ending -e when the masculine form ends in -gu: aigu, ambigu → aiguë, ambiguë."

After the spelling reforms, this became "aigüe", "argüe", etc. The Jade Knight 06:26, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

I disagree. The spelling reforms mandated that "aiguë" become "aigüe", that "argue" become "argüe", etc., but no one actually followed those reforms, and eventually the Academy decided to make them optional. (This might be worth noting in the article, but not by incorrecting the existing text.) —Ruakh_TALK 14:41, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Actually this reform was released as a "recommendation" (you should) and not not as a mandatory rules. As far as I know a there is now a prescription (you shall) by the "Education Nationale" to teach this new orthography to children at the primary school. I personally agree with this part of the reform (use of ü ë ï ä) because it is a very simple and regular rule.

Problem with this reform is : books are still released with the "old" orthography.--Overkilled (talk) 07:26, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Punctuation, regionalism

What about rules for punctuation, etc. I understand that some or all punctuation marks are normally led by a space (merde !), rather than being set tight against the last word, as in English.

What are the differences in Quebec French, and other variants?

Found a stub: Punctuation in French. —Michael Z. 2007-09-23 20:43 Z

G-to-p section

There is a lot of good content in this recently-added and quickly-expanding section. I am concerned, however, about the reliance on a single source (TLFi) for pronunciation, especially for vowels. Furthermore, going from individual dictionary entries to what apparently aims to be an exhaustive list of general spelling-to-pronunciation rules constitutes original research. I added a reference to Fouché (1956), still (I believe) the most complete description, but more recent citations are needed. The main problem, though, is that when this section is finished (with all the rules and all the exceptions), it will be as a long as a book. Or too long to be useful, anyway, without adding some more structure to the lists of rules to guide the reader. CapnPrep (talk) 17:04, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for making your points: I think your concern about OR is valid here. I've moved the section to my userspace: we should think about how to come up with a useful section that is fully sourced. Grover cleveland (talk) 04:58, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

History of French orthography

This not an easy section because the written language was not standardised prior the creation of the "Académie Française" in 1635 in the period called Classical French. Orthography changes in older periods were (and it probably the same with English) mostly lead by the evolution of the language itself: a kind of compromise between the local pronunciation and the old or traditional spelling derived from the etymology. A French Canadian would probably more efficient than me to fill in this section nevertheless few is still better than nothing. So I will try to help by the reading of fr:Histoire de la langue française maybe with some examples borrowed there on some current words spelling.--Overkilled (talk) 10:42, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

missing info

We need something like Irish orthography here, which lays out the pronunciation of all standard spelling conventions. I thought I had the complete list for French somewhere, but can't locate it. (fr:Liste des graphies des phonèmes du français is perhaps overkill, since it includes silent grammatical endings and English borrowings & doesn't distinguish liaison.) kwami (talk) 13:53, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

for sure it would be overkill even with borrowed words removed though many are not pronounced in the English way at all).
Of course it includes grammatical endings because some grammar knowledge is necessary to discriminate between two distinct pronunciations over a same cluster ; for instance "ent" whether it's in "comment" (how) or in "(ils) viennent" ((they) come)). I remember, as native speaker, when I was early learning how to read at the age of 3 years old, my only clue (because I ignored formal grammar) was to read with voice in help to choose the right sound.
Naturally it doesn't distinguish liaison because basically how liaison works is just like the merge of space separated words into a single one ; for instance "les oiseaux" (the birds) would be pronounced as if it was written "lèsoiseaux" (here I have to substitute the "e" by a "é" to backup the "è" sound when "es" is in final position in a short list of words known as "déterminants" (articles: des ("some" or "a" when plural), les ("the" when plural) or possessive adjectives like "mes" ("my" when plural) "tes" ("your" when plural) and "ses" ("their" when plural).
. Hope this helps.--Overkilled (talk) 15:49, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I was suggesting that we add the lexicographic conventions of that table, ignoring plurals & liason etc. As it is, our readers would have no idea how to pronounce something like août. It would be more economical to treat liason and pronunciation of grammatical endings separately. kwami (talk) 16:11, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

The sequence "en" in French can arguably be pronounced in at least 9 different ways (though only the first 6 are common):

• silent as in viennent
• /ən/ as in tenir
• /ɑ̃/ as in science
• /ɛ/ as in ennemi
• /ɛn/ as in abdomen
• /ɛ̃/ as in lien
• /e/ as in décennie
• /en/ as in lichen
• /œn/ as in groschen

Grover cleveland (talk) 17:49, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

"en" alone (out of any context: grammar or letters around) is evidently not enough to predict the sound produced.

• it is the same /ə/ in both viennent and tenir the slighly difference your hear is due to the final position in viennent ("nt" is a silent grammatical feature here) and for a native French the "n" in "tenir" belongs to the "nir" cluster/syllable and not to any "en" one.
• why only /ɛ/ in your mind for ennemi when everyone will heard /ɛn/ too precisely because the significative cluster is "enn" and not only "en".
• /e/ in décennie is actually /en/ because of vocalic attraction with the initial "é" but is also commonly /ɛn/ for many speakers around Paris. Here /en/ and /ɛn/ are very common allophones.
• in my dialect lichen is definitively /ɛn/ because still felt as foreign borrowed word.
• groschen is definitively not French and there /œn/, /en/ and /en/ will be the common allophones

So imho 9 is not at least but rather at the most instead.--Overkilled (talk) 21:01, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Except for loan words, the pronunciations are almost entirely predictable. There's en as a digraph, ien as a trigraph, and e with a double consonant (including nn) to show it's /ε/, and e before a single consonant (including n) to show it's /ə/ or /e/. Once we account for grammatical endings such as 3pl -ent, and the general conventions for /ε/ vs. /e/, which can be cross-ref'd in a footnote, all we need to say is that the digraph en is /ɑ̃/ and the trigraph ien is /jɛ̃/. Not simple, perhaps, but easy enough to summarize. kwami (talk) 23:13, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

This proposed rule doesn't account for quite a few other cases such as:

• the /ɛn/ word-finally in words like abdomen (but examen is an exception with /ɛ̃/)
• /ɑ̃/ in the large number of words like science or patient
• /ɛ̃/ in words such as benzine, agenda, rhododendron
• /ɑ̃/ in ennui, (but /ɛn/ in ennemi)

I started trying to work out a pretty exhaustive set of rules for this in the article a while ago. I got tagged, probably correctly, for Original Research (I moved the stuff I was working on to User:Grover cleveland/French orthography: you're welcome to take a look). We should really find some kind of text book or reference work that has the rules. Cheers. Grover cleveland (talk) 23:37, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Your exceptions are partly loans, partly due to the fact that French orthography is somewhat ambiguous. I'm not advocating that we become a French pronunciation dictionary, just that we get the basics down. kwami (talk) 19:50, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Sure: "the basics" are definitely worth summarizing, provided they can be referenced from reliable sources. My only objection was to your claim that "[e]xcept for loan words, the pronunciations are almost entirely predictable", which does not seem to be the case (unless you extend "loan words" to cover almost anything). While French pronunciations are certainly more predictable those of English, they are far less predictable than, say, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese or Hindi. Cheers. Grover cleveland (talk) 21:25, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Ligatures

No mention? Mcewan (talk) 14:03, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Pronunciations missing

There are no IPA transcriptions of the vowels. A bare list is of little use. --Vuo (talk) 17:03, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

ç

Why is ç used instead of s? Given that ç started out as Visigothic z, how come it's used like it is? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.139.86.185 (talk) 19:27, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Because as in English, in French you pronounce the s between vowels like a z. If you still want it to be pronounced as a normal s, you have to use ç. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.116.192.126 (talk) 18:30, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

Because in old French the letter z and ç and c before e/i/y were all pronounced like /ts/. This evolved from the palatalized c sound in Latin, like Italian /tʃ/ or Spanish /θ/. In French then as it moved towards Middle and Modern French this sound shifted and ended up loosing the /t/ sound and simplifying the phoneme to /s/. ç represents a c that shifted to an /s/ sound but no longer has the light vowel e/i/y to signify this pronunciation, so the tail is used for this (etymologically or because of the combined ending): face + -ade = façade. 2WR1 (talk) 18:20, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

Sound to spelling correspondences

I have the same reservations about this section as I did for Grover cleveland's additions back in early 2008 (as discussed above). I didn't notice when Mark J added these tables in December 2010, otherwise I would have said something at the time. It's clear from the other discussion above that people expect to see a list like this in the article. So be it. But the classification into "major values" vs. "minor values" is definitely OR, or at best an original synthesis of information from unidentified sources. Does anyone feel strongly about maintaining it? Also, I don't see the point of having a column for "Exceptions" in all three tables just to mention solennel and oignon. CapnPrep (talk) 07:56, 13 April 2012 (UTC)

la poêle

The combination "oe" is missing (I don't mean "œ"). I think it's generally pronounced like "oi".--95.116.192.126 (talk) 18:34, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

"next to voiceless consonant" meaning

It is stated that letter b is pronounced as /p/ next to a voiceless consonant. Does it mean that b is located after a voiceless consonant? If it is so, it seems to be wrong. Shouldn't it be "before a voiceless consonant" instead? Ermishin (talk) 05:23, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

Missing translations of French passages

In the Diacritics section, the quotations are not translated. This is the English Wikipedia, and one would guess that if a user visits this page then they would not be familiar with the French language to begin with.

I will translate with Google Translate, but I urge all contributors with French knowledge to please fix my attempt.

Tebello TheWHAT!!?? 08:45, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Contradiction with Reforms of French orthography

In this article, we say, "The spelling of words is largely based on the pronunciation of Old French c. 1100–1200 CE and has stayed more or less the same since then". In Reforms of French orthography, we say, "Spelling and punctuation before the 16th century was highly erratic", and "The third (1740) and fourth (1762) editions of the Académie dictionary were very progressive ones, changing the spelling of about half the words altogether." Phonological history of French says, "Spelling, however, has barely changed, which accounts for the wide differences between current spelling and pronunciation."

All of these statements are unsupported by reference. Let's try to clean this up. I'm not an expert in French orthography, but I'll try to help. Sancho 17:24, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

But the statement is not so absolute, it says "largely based on" and "more or less the same". There is only a contradiction if you ignore these qualifying phrases. Also, the fact that Old French spelling was erratic does not actually contradict the statement in this article. I maintain that it is true. Modern French spelling is still largely based on Old French pronunciation, despite all changes and reforms that have taken place since then. Put differently, the orthography of Modern French is much better suited to write Old French than it is to write Modern French, although historical Old French orthography is not nearly as regular and systematic. Put yet another way, the French essentially spell their language as if it were Old French, pretending it were still pronounced that way. This should not be unfamiliar to speakers of English, because in English, we do the same. This phenomenon is called "historical spelling", keeping outdated orthographical practices and never fully adapting the system to the changes that have occurred since then. It may be horribly inconvenient and stupid in many ways, but a radical reform would make all pre-existing literature look completely alien and illegible to those who have not specifically studied the traditional system, and make many differences between regional dialects and accents much more apparent, which are glossed over by the current system of spelling French. Less importantly perhaps, it would also additionally obscure etymological connections to Latin and other languages such as other Romance languages and English. None of these advantages may seem worth keeping such a cumbersome system, but it surely has plain old human inertia going in its favour. Such a reform would encounter such formidable obstacles that it would seem to be completely unworkable in practice. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:35, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

I will agree with Florian here and say additionally that even if many words were respelled in the 1700's, that doesn't necessarily change the basic nature of the spelling system. Perhaps the most noticeable change is the replacement of silent s consonants before other consonants with a circumflex or acute, e.g. writing rêver in stead of resver. Some changes actually made the spelling even more conservative than Old French, e.g. the spelling temps for "time" when Old French often wrote tens (the source BTW of modern English "tense"), or long in place of Old French lonc "long". Some changes in essence returned the spelling to the Old French norm (e.g. writing savoir in place of strange early modern variants like sçapvoir). But none of this changes the fact that e.g. there's still a silent r in rêver, a silent ps in temps, and a silent g in long, or that masculine-feminine pairs like fin - fine differ radically in pronunciation in ways that doesn't match the spelling at all (but does closely track Old French pronunciation), or that the modern spelling of a word like point matches Old French pronunciation quite closely (where it would have been pronounced much like English "point") but hardly matches modern pronunciation, or that words like cent, sang, sans all sound exactly the same in modern French but were all pronounced differently in early Old French in a way that matches the modern spelling (note, Old French wrote and pronounced sanc not sang).

A modern respelling of e.g. J'ai faim et je veux manger maintenant according to modern pronunciation might produce something like J'é fen é je veu manjé mentnan. Benwing (talk) 02:55, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

I'm not ignoring the qualifiers. I just want to know what is the case. Has spelling remained more or less the same since 1100-1200 CE? Or was spelling highly erratic with the 3rd and 4th edition of the Académie dictionary changing the spelling of half the words? That is not more or less the same. Sancho 08:10, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

Very approximately speaking, Modern French words are now essentially spelled in a way that would fit the pronunciation of 12th century Old French (at least better than the pronunciation of any other period), even if Old French spelling was never this systematic and there were many variants (often including the variant currently employed for the Modern French counterpart). Almost all post-12th-century changes is pronunciation are not properly, systematically reflected in the orthography, only by "misspellings" (such as inverted, i. e., ahistorical, hypercorrect spellings as suis for Old French sui and other spurious additions as the p in temps or the g in vingt). The principles of the orthography have stayed the same, and there is much continuity so that a scribe from the 12th century (or a hypothetical scholar familiar with Old but not Modern French) who were confronted with modern texts (without ever getting to hear the modern language) would not realise that the pronunciation has changed radically. (In fact, by the 12th century, s in front of other consonants was never pronounced as /s/ anymore, instead as a mere lengthening of the previous vowel when the consonant was voiced and as a /h/ when unvoiced.) Clearer now? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 19:20, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

Πsituation

It was rumoured that this ligature was intended to be removed. This article needs more info on this. 178.49.152.66 (talk) 12:35, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

incorrect alphabet names

Hi, the alphabet names for the french letters are incorrect; those are actually for the Spanish alphabet. Mr. Nushmutt (talk) 20:48, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

They are correct. You need to pronounce the names following French spelling, so something like "effe" is pronounced /ɛf/, not /ɛfɛ/ as in Spanish. 82.245.24.4 (talk) 20:39, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

Æ

Clarify meaning of "as named dog’s parsley". ZFT (talk) 03:52, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

ÿ

Should a line be added for the letter ÿ in the 'Vowels and combinations of vowel letters' section? I know it's only used in place names really, but there are demonyms used as examples for other vowels or vowel combinations. 2WR1 (talk) 05:35, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

Well I added it, if anyone disagrees with its inclusion then we can talk about it here. My reasoning is that geographic names are already used as examples for other letters and combinations of letters. 2WR1 (talk) 18:32, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

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conjugation specific pronunciations

In the charts section, it seems there's some trouble figuring out how represent certain pronunciations that are more or less specific to conjugations. So I thought It's better to discuss it here so maybe we can figure out something that works best.

• First theres the pronunciations (not considering the common /a/-/ɑ/ merger) for 'â'. The exceptions are for the conjugations ending in -âmes, -âtes, and -ât. But then there is also the word 'dégât' for which /a/ is an alternative pronunciation. SO the exception cannot be fully attributed to the conjugations.

• Then for 'ai' theres two: the conjugations ending in -ai or -rai must always be pronounced /e/, but for words like 'ai', 'baisser', 'aiguille', 'gai', and 'quai' /ɛ/ is always an alternative, so there's no easy way to show that only for some of these the pronunciation /ɛ/ is possible but for the conjugations it never is. Then there's 'ai' in the conjugations of 'faire' where it's pronounced /ə/. It's been easily enough explain by the little note, but I recently discovered the word 'faisan' also shares this exception, which makes a problem.

• There's also -ez, which maybe should be moved to the vowels and consonants combination section along with -ent? Just a thought, it's handled okay right now.

• Also for eu/eû exceptional pronunciation /y/ from 'avoir', I feel like those are handled well enough.

The main thing I think is that it sort of makes the charts look messy and harder to read when there's a bunch of long descriptions of certain exceptions, it makes it hard to find the words that are being mentioned through all the English explanation, so I feel like those should be kept to a minimum, which I guess is what I'm trying to do. My thought right now is to put conjugation-specific exceptions in the third exceptional value slot, and, if they share that exception with a few other words, to list the conjugation example last in the list so that a short explanation of that specific exception can be placed after the list of words so as to make it very clear which words are French examples and which words are English explanations. I'm also thinking decreasing the font size for any words that are not purely the examples themselves in the charts could be helpful for readability. So I'll try putting all of this into action and see if it looks better. But I would love any input or opinions anyone has so we can discuss it here. Thanks! 2WR1 (talk) 20:27, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

small text

I tried implementing small text using '< + small + >' for any information in the examples sections of the charts that isn't specifically a French word example. This is a convention used in the English Orthography page so I thought it might help here too. I think it looks really good and contributes to readability, but what do other people think? If no-one else likes it I can reverse it. Thanks! 2WR1 (talk) 21:02, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

Sound to spelling correspondences and original research

It seems that the sound to spelling correspondences section had been marked as "possibly containing original research". I've done a lot of work there trying to find exceptional spellings and organize the charts well and make sure they cover all the quirks of French spelling. Anything I have added has been found and can be easily looked up in French dictionaries and I've also checked everything that was preexisting. Can someone please clarify to me why specifically this section has been marked as possibly containing original research? And let me know what needs to be done to make it acceptable? Does every single word need to be cited to a dictionary entry? I feel like this must be overkill and would make the charts very messy looking, so I'd like to know what actually needs to be done. Thanks! 2WR1 (talk) 21:02, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

It seems that this is something that I just missed for a while because the notice has been there since 2012 apparently. I found the user who added the notice, CapnPrep (talk · contribs), but I can't tell if they're still an active user. 2WR1 (talk) 21:19, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

Digraphs & Trigraphs

Is the Digraphs & Trigraphs section needed, couldn’t it be deleted?, it doesn’t add anything & the corresponding phonemes for them are already covered in Sound to spelling correspondences. 78.17.143.44 (talk) 22:36, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

œ

How to pronounce -er in French words? 109.106.227.160 (talk) 20:26, 15 July 2022 (UTC)

Treatment of ⟨e⟩ and ⟨è⟩ in final syllables

The pronunciation of the word assez seems to be another exception to the rule that ⟨e⟩ is pronounced as /ɛ/ before a final consonant, silent or pronounced, as it is formulated in the article. Similarly, the grave accent in the word après seems to be unnecessary according to the same rule. Could the description of this rule be expanded by those who know French? — GPodkolzin ^Talk 15:25, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

Added assez. As for final -ès, it is /ɛ/, whereas final -es is silent. Burzuchius (talk) 18:05, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

Major vs minor values

I have absolutely no idea what this article means by major and minor values on the sound to spelling correspondence section, and I can’t find any mention of this term on the internet outside of this one article 24.205.146.158 (talk) 07:04, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

I believe that "major value" means that a particular letter or digraph is pronounced a particular way, the "minor value" is for the second more common pronunciation, and "exceptions" is for what doesn't fit in the first 2 categories.

Perhaps the terms "major value" and "minor value" could be changed to something like "Most often sounding as", and "second most often sounding as". But that would be more wordy... Dhrm77 (talk) 10:51, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Law

In the vowel and consonant table “/ɑs/ in the 18th century and still traditional French approximation of Laws, the colloquial Scottish form of the economist John Law's name." is given as an exception for aw, though this is true, I believe this this is such a rare exception that it should be removed from the table since then one could possibly add a practically infinite amount of French approximations of foreign names. 2A01:B340:66:E6D7:D5F2:8B0A:2DD9:C5E7 (talk) 10:34, 14 October 2023 (UTC)