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
-
and -emment adverbs but that's it's own rule so it's fine
-
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!
I've gotten a TXT file of the entirety of the Littré dictionary lol so I'm searching for words with oë in them. The common usage seems to be as a precursor to oè, e.g. poëte → poète, aloës → aloès, troëne → troène, kakatoës → cacatoès, poëre (obsolete); or to oé, e.g. goëland → goéland, goëmon → goémon, pekoë → pekoé.
I did also find proëme, which once was also proème, but seems to now have settled on proême. I've noticed that Littré uses both è and ê in his phonetic transcriptions where modern French would pronounce as /ɛ/, so maybe which one gets used depends on which pronunciation dominated for a while, but I also have no idea how ê is supposed to sound different from è.
The second most common occurrence is in words where it makes a /wɛ/ sound, like foëne, boësse, and coësre.1 However, what I'm searching for is uses of oë/oê2 as /wa/, which are:
- boëtte, which is now boîte, the circumflex indicating a dropped s;
- coëffe, as mentioned above, which is now coiffe;
- poêle, the only current usage of oê, it seems.
Interestingly, I also found poëslon from an excerpt by O. de Serres from the 16th century. I think this is a precursor to poêlon (une petite poêle), which would explain the circumflex to indicate a dropped s. moême is also listed as a variant to même, which does have a dropped s, but that's pronounced /mɛm/.
There's further mysteries, though: Littré lists as variants of cuy the spellings coëf and couët, and it's unclear how these are pronounced. I would guess anywhere from /kɔe/ to /kɔɛ/ to /kuɛt/ to /kwɛ/. Another quotation he includes uses the word grailloët, and I haven't been able to find what that word means or how it's spelt now. I would guess /gʁajɔɛ/ for it.
In any case, I think it's a little unprincipled to be analyzing uses of a particular orthography without having the context of historical vowel shifts that probably accompanied these orthographies. Given that I'm looking at one very specific orthography and a narrow set of vowels (/wa/, /wɛ/) it seems like it'll be a lot of work to trawl through textbooks on historical French linguistics just to find this information...
- I'm excluding loanwords like floë /flo/ and broë /bro/. These two in particular seem to be Norwegian.
- I'd also like to find uses of oe as /wa/, but this file uses simply oe where it should use œ, so it's difficult to distinguish the two.