0.4 [ʁ], silent final consonants, and liaison — Epoché
What you will be able to do Produce the French [ʁ] at the back of your mouth instead of substituting the English r , which is made at the front and is one of the loudest markers of an English accent. Know which letters at the end of a written word are silent, so that you stop pronouncing the -e , -s , -t , -d and -x that are sitting there on the page. State the three kinds of liaison with an example of each: the joins you must make, the joins you must not make, and the joins you may make or leave out. Read thirty short sentences aloud with the right consonants at the ends of words and the right joins between them. Prerequisites : 0.3 — you should already be able to produce the three nasal vowels and to leave the written n unpronounced, because several of the liaison examples below are nasal words whose hidden consonant comes back to life. See 0.3 Sounds if you need it. The three previous lessons were about vowels and about rhythm. This one finishes the volume with the two things that are left, and they are both consonant problems rather than vowel problems. The first is one sound, the French r , which is made in a place your tongue has never used for a consonant. The second is bigger and stranger: French writes consonants at the ends of words and then does not say them, except sometimes, when the next word begins with a vowel, in which case it says them after all and attaches them to the following word. Put like that it sounds arbitrary, and it is not. Old French pronounced those final consonants; over the centuries they dropped, and they dropped last in front of a vowel, where they were easy to hold on to. The spelling never caught up. The written form is a fossil, and the rules of this lesson tell you how to get from that page to a modern mouth. There is a practical reason to take this seriously rather than treating it as polish. Because the endings are silent, French words are shorter in speech than they look on the page, and word boundaries move. A beginner who pronounces every letter produces something no French listener can segment; a beginner who drops the endings and makes the joins is understood immediately, even with a heavy accent elsewhere. The French r is made at the back of the mouth Start with what the English r is, because you have to stop doing it before you can start doing anything else. In most varieties of English the sound is made by curling or bunching the tongue in the middle of the mouth, without touching anything, and the lips usually round a little as well. Nothing at the back of the mouth moves. It is a smooth, dark, vowel-like sound, so natural to English speakers that they do not notice making it. The French sound is made in a completely different place. The back of the tongue rises towards the soft palate, and the small flap of tissue hanging there vibrates in the escaping air, or the narrow gap produces friction. The tip of the tongue does nothing at all; it can rest against the bottom of your mouth throughout. The result is a scraping or gargling sound with no vowel quality in it. Here is the reliable way in, and it works for almost everybody within a few minutes. Say the English word hang and stop on the last sound, the one written ng . Feel where the back of your tongue is: it is pressed against the roof of your mouth at the very back. That is the right place. Now relax the contact very slightly so that air can hiss through, and keep pushing air. What comes out is a scrape at the back of the mouth. That scrape is the French consonant. If you can also say the sound at the end of the Scottish word loch or the German word Bach , make that sound and then turn your voice on while keeping the friction: the same result arrives from the other direction. Two mistakes are worth naming. The first is doing both at once: many learners produce a genuine back scrape and keep the English tongue curl underneath it, which sounds like a growl and is immediately identifiable. Check by putting the tip of your tongue firmly behind your bottom teeth and keeping it there while you make the sound; if the sound survives, the curl is gone. The second is overdoing the friction. In careful speech the sound is quite audible; in ordinary speech, especially at the end of a word, it is almost a vowel. Aim for the strong version and let it relax by itself. The letter appears everywhere, which is good news: you will get many repetitions without looking for them. Six short sentences from the corpus to start with. Say each one twice, and on the second pass check that the tip of your tongue stayed down. French English Il est rouge. [1] It's red. Regarde bien. [2] Take a good look. C'est mon frère. [3] That's my brother. Très bien ! [4] Very well! Où est Paris ? [5] Where is Paris? Regarde la forêt ! [6] Look at the forest! The fourth is the hardest: the r comes straight after a t , in a cluster, and there is no vowel in front of it to ease you in. Silent final consonants The default in French is that a consonant written at the end of a word is not pronounced. That is the rule, not the exception, and it is easiest to learn as a default with a short list of things that override it. The letters that go silent most reliably are -s , -t , -d , -x , -z , -p and -g . So the word for too much ends in a vowel sound despite its written p , the word for small ends in a vowel sound despite its written t , and the plural marker -s is completely inaudible, which is why plural in spoken French is carried by the article in front of the noun and not by the noun itself. That last point is not a detail of pronunciation; it changes how the grammar works, and we come back to it in the grammar volume. A final written -e is also silent, but it does something before it goes. It makes the consonant in front of it audible. This is the single most productive pattern in the language: the masculine form of an adjective ends in a silent consonant, the feminine adds a written -e , and the effect on the ear is that a conso