and finding out exceptions that make me exceptionally upset.
RULE: a tréma on a vowel following another vowel makes the two vowels pronounced separately. EXCEPT: foëne /fwɛn/
RULE: e makes one of the three e-like sounds when not silent: /e/, /ə/, or /ɛ/. EXCEPT1: femme /fam/, solennel /sɔlanɛl/
RULE: except for loanwords2, œ is /œ/ and oe is /oe/. EXCEPT: moelle /mwalø/, poêle /pwal/
and of course everyone's favourite:
RULE: oi is /wa/. EXCEPT: oignon /ɔɲɔ̃/
some of these I think are excusable. like foëne maybe migrated from /fɔɛn/ which is understandable if you squish the vowels together. em and en are sometimes is sometimes /ɑ̃n/ (e.g. emmener, entre) so maybe femme and solennel are in that category. but oe and oi above are INEXCUSABLE and I'm very curious to see whether there even are any other words with this orthography and proununciation
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and -emment adverbs but that's it's own rule so it's fine
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some loanwords are from Latin, similar to how UK spelling will retain œs in places, and are pronounced /e/ or /ɛ/; others are from German where originally there was an ö, and pronounced /ø/
I'm on the hunt for more oe words that pronounce like /wa/. So far I've found:
- moellon /mwalɔ̃/ - rubble
- coëffe /kwaf/ - archaic spelling of coiffe
from the second one I just remembered that oi also used to be pronounced /we/, and in places like Québec words like moi do tend towards /mwe/, so I suspect both oi and oe were pronounced /we/ and eventually shifted towards /wa/ for the former and dragged the latter along with it. so fine, I guess this is acceptable too, with oë seemingly a common alternate spelling for oe in this case. but that doesn't explain why it's poêle rather than poële!