The French language is very difficult to represent accurately using a word based transliteration system. The reason is that there are many words which have two end pronunciations depending on the word which follows them in the sentence. This concept is called liaison.

Liaison

You can find out about liaison on this web site.

http://www.languageguide.org/french/grammar/pronunciation/liaison.html

The techniques below describe how to represent the liaison sounds unambiguously once you have worked them out. It does not explain how to work them out in the first place; however the link above does give a good background into the actual mechanics (or the method to the madness, some might say).

To get around the problem of having two pronunciations of the same word, you simply need to create two entries for the word in the vocab. book. You then need to invent a special marker to clearly indicate the liaison version. We use the Greek marker Φ on the end of the word. For example, “nous avons” means “We have”:

Word	Transliteration	Translation
nous	NOO!	pron. us, we
nous	NOO!S Φ	pron. us, we
avons	AV- ΔON!	v(avoir) have

Note the Δ is a nasalisation marker which is explained in the next section. The – symbol is a syllable separator. The ! symbol is an indicator that that vowel sound is shortened.

Once you know the pronunciation of the liaison version (and most dictionaries will only provide the non-liaison version so this may not be as easy as you think L) then it is actually quite easy to know when to use it. Whenever the next word in a sentence starts with a vowel sound, you select the liaison version. Simple!

Nasalisation

Another strange concept is that many vowel sounds are pronounced through the nose and not the mouth. This is called nasalisation. It is not really possible to write down the nasalised sound, so all we can do is find an approximate English sound and mark it clearly (in our case using the Greek marker Δ). You then need to learn how to say them. Simple!

Here are some nasalised sounds. Note the ‘N’ is barely audible.

Word	Transliteration	Translation
brun	BR ΔUN	adj. brown
train	TRΔAN	(m) n. train
avons	AV- ΔON!	v(avoir) have

Nasalisation and Liaison

When liaison occurs with a nasalised word, the nasalisation is cancelled out and the word reverts to the non-nasalised pronunciation. This is shown in this table below. The words are

“un homme" which means “a man”

Word	Transliteration	Translation
un	ΔUN	art. a, an
un	OO!N Φ	art. a, an
homme	O!M	(m) n. man, person

Note that ‘h’ is never pronounced in French so the above word is assumed to start with a vowel sound.

The ‘h’ consonant and liaison exceptions

Although ‘h’ is always silent, there are (surprisingly) exceptions to the ‘h’ rule regarding liaison. Some ‘h’ words (notably ones which did not originate from Latin) still have a silent ‘h’ but they do not cause the liaison rule to apply! If you want, you can mark these words with a liaison symbol at the start. There are relatively few of them.

“Un hazard” is “a chance”

Word	Transliteration	Translation
un	ΔUN	art. a, an
un	OO!N Φ	art. a, an
hazard	ΦA!S-AR!	(m) n. chance, luck

The pronunciation is “ΔUN ΦA!S-AR!” and not “OO!N Φ ΦA!S-AR!”. If you use this system, if you ever write down a sentence with two Φ Φ appearing together, you know you have made a mistake. Remember, every system is a personal choice. Use something which you do not find too complicated. Once you have mastered the pronunciation, you can stop maintaining this part of the dictionary in any case!

Elision

Elision is the opposite of liaison. A pronounced sound becomes silent. These words are actually written with an apostrophe (‘) for the missing letter. For example “je ai” which means “I have” becomes “j’ai”. Currently, the only support for this is to enter the words as you learn them individually.

Word	Transliteration	Translation
je	JZUH!	art. a, an
ai	EY!	v(avoir) have
J’ai	JZ ‘ EY!	I have

Vowel clusters

There are many vowel clusters (notably on the ends of words but a lot can appear anywhere) which all have the same sound. For example, all these letters, appearing on the end, have the same sound ‘EY!’

ê, è, e, ais, ait, êt, ès, aie

We can define a transliteration, and a helping regular expression to act as a filter, as follows

Transliteration	Filter (regular expression)	Pronunciation guide
EY!	ê$ \| è$ \| e$ \| ais$ \| ait$ \| êt$ \| ès$ \| aie$	The sound is a short ‘ay’ sound like in ‘hay’ but shorter.

The regular expression is not meant to represent a complex list of word mappings. It is includes as a helping filter only.