Rule-breaking French words

December 24, 2019 1:26 PM

I recently learned, after years of learning French, that monsieur is pronounced [məsjø] and not [mɔ̃sjœr] (I always thought meu-ssieuh was just the quick version or something). It got me thinking, what other French words don't follow French pronunciation rules?

(To be clear, I am talking about words that aren't pronounced as they are spelled *according to the rules of French*)

So far I have come up with fleur-de-lis and Reims because as far as I know, an S at the end of a word isn't usually pronounced, femme (pronounced fAmme), évidemment (pronounced évidAmment), oeuf/oeufs...

Can anyone give me any more, or is there maybe a list somewhere? I tried googling but everything I found was from the point of view of English spelling rules, which isn't what I'm looking for.

I bet there are lots of these for place names too...

posted by iamsuper to Writing & Language (18 answers total)

Whey.. uh weigh, non way. Ah, OUI.
posted by humboldt32 at 1:36 PM on December 24, 2019 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: For example, 'oui' doesn't qualify because it *does* follow the rules of French. (Sorry, didn't explain that very well).
posted by iamsuper at 1:40 PM on December 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

A good grammar should list the most common surprising spellings. I have a book called 1001 Pitfalls in French, which I see is still in print; it has a list.
posted by zompist at 1:51 PM on December 24, 2019

I think humboldt32 was pointing out that 'oui' is often pronounced 'way', instead of (as French phonetics would dictate) 'wee'
posted by brainmouse at 2:08 PM on December 24, 2019 [8 favorites]

For example, 'oui' doesn't qualify because it *does* follow the rules of French.

I think what humboldt32 is referring to is the variation "ouais" often used rather than "oui," so you'd hear [ˈwɛ] when expecting [ˈwi]. But kind of like "yeah" for "yes", there is a written variation to represent this more non-formal way of using the word (and now I'm going down a rabbit hole and discovering that "ouais" actually predates its current usage as a synonym for "oui", so it's a bit of a folk etymology it turns out to consider it a mispronunciation of "oui." I didn't know that when I started writing this comment!)

So I think to refine your criterion a little bit more, and assuming there are other examples where informal usage doesn't quite match formal, you are only interested in words that break the pronunciation rules even when a person is speaking in fairly formal/academic French?
posted by solotoro at 2:10 PM on December 24, 2019 [8 favorites]

Adding 'fils' to your list though, as well as cassis and plus (depending on the meaning - so even more unusual since it's a heteronym)
posted by brainmouse at 2:12 PM on December 24, 2019

I mean, you're probably bumping up against regional pronunciations quite a lot here. Someone from Tolouse will pronounce "pain" (as in, bread) something like "peng", versus the Parisian "pan" (with or without the swallowed/nasal 'n').
posted by parm at 2:13 PM on December 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

Some French words ending in C pronounce the C ( lac, parc, ) others do not ( banc, estomac )
posted by Rapunzel1111 at 2:17 PM on December 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

Final “s” may be pronounced as an intervocalic when the next word starts with a vowel. (I mean yeah)
posted by toodleydoodley at 2:22 PM on December 24, 2019

More words that break the rule and pronounce the ending letter S,
Ours ( bear)
mars ( March)
os ( bone)
bis ( second) .
posted by Rapunzel1111 at 2:27 PM on December 24, 2019

Usually [...]ille is pronounced 'eee' as in la veille but with three words (and their derivations) it's 'eel'. You remember those three with the phrase "milles villes tranquilles"
posted by mono blanco at 2:37 PM on December 24, 2019 [3 favorites]

Also oignon. By the rules of French pronunciation it should be [wah-nion] but it's [oh-nion].
posted by mono blanco at 2:45 PM on December 24, 2019 [2 favorites]

It's been a while since I knew anything about it but doesn't Aix en Provence sort of fail to follow the rules? Liaison between ai and e should be /z/?
posted by less of course at 2:53 PM on December 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

I've long wanted such a list, ever since I first learned French and asked a shopkeeper where to find the onions (pronounced as written...). Here is a partial list of common words whose spelling and pronunciation differ.

And here's a list of words that many native speakers pronounce incorrectly.

Plenty of proper names don't follow the rules. My favorite is De Broglie.

Forvo is often a useful resource for verifying how something is pronounced. Note that there are regional differences, as has been mentioned already. In the name of the city of Cassis, the terminal s is pronounced, but it generally is not pronounced in "crème de Cassis." Some people pronounce the final s of Vacqueyras, and some don't.

Also don't forget the h aspiré. There's a list of common words with in Grevisse, Le Bon usage. Interestingly, that's the only such list in Grevisse, though there are notes on exceptions to orthographic rules in the general discussion of French phonetics.
posted by brianogilvie at 3:48 PM on December 24, 2019 [5 favorites]

How about août? French Wiktionary suggests it can be pronounced with or without the final t sound, and some Canadian French speakers may include the a at the beginning.

I think aou is not a common combination in French, so maybe there aren't specific rules for it.
posted by invokeuse at 4:14 PM on December 24, 2019

The "exceptions" column of the "sound to spelling correspondences" section of the French orthography article on Wikipedia actually does a decent job pointing these out. Examples include:

- the fact that fais- (when followed by a vowel) and eu- stems, when they are forms of faire and avoir, are /fəz/ and /y/ instead of the expected /fɛz/ and /ø/
- the /a/ pronunciation of adverbs in -emment like fréquemment, évidemment, etc.
- the non-pronunciation of l in fils

...among many other things. It's actually rather comprehensive as these things go.
posted by andrewesque at 10:05 PM on December 24, 2019 [2 favorites]

In Bordeaux the e at the end of a word is not silent. Mill-uh vill-uh tranquill-uh.
It's like a half syllable and unstressed.
posted by evenolderthanshelooks at 5:19 PM on December 26, 2019

Auxerre (the city in Burgundy) is pronounced the same way it would be pronounced if you were to replace the x with a double s. But then I would say French in general is not the most intuitive or user-friendly language in terms of spelling. From what I gather, it's common for French school kids who are reasonably proficient in most subjects to struggle with l'orthographe. On an anecdotal note, I was among the worst spellers in my CP and CE1 classes (the French equivalent of grades 1 and 2), whereas English spelling almost immediately became one of my stronger subjects when my family moved to the States.
posted by DavidfromBA at 7:29 PM on December 27, 2019 [1 favorite]