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!
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.
I found this online Dictionnaire de l'Académie française and the really cool thing about it is that you can search for all historical versions of the dictionary so you can literally see the spelling changes going back about four centuries! Here's a table a few of the words above and their Officially Sanctioned Orthographies from a few of the earliest years of the dictionary.
| 1694 | 1718 | 1740 | 1762 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| poêle (pan) | poële | poële | poêle | poêle |
| poêle (furnace) | poële, poile | poële, poile | poêle | poêle |
| poêle (dais) | poesle, poësle1, poisle | poesle, poisle | poêle | poêle |
| coiffe | coeffe, coiffe | coeffe, coiffe | coëffe, coîffe | coiffe |
| moelle | moelle, moëlle1 | moëlle | moëlle | moelle |
| boîte | boiste | boiste | boîte, boête | boîte |
There are actually three etymologies for poêle, from Latin's patella, pēnsilis, and pallium, respectively. In Old French, these seem to have been païella, poil, and paile. I guess the reason they converged onto such a bizarre orthography is because they were influencing one another.
Based on the 1740 edition, I think there was some recognition that the use of oe for /wa/ is unusual, and that they started spelling it as oë to indicate that pronunciation, but was then dropped later on, except keeping oê for the removed s.
Unfortunately, it doesn't go back far enough for spellings of boîte before boiste, and Littré sources boëtte from Paré, a 16th-century surgeon. I might have to reference a Middle French dictionary for that. In face, I suspect a lot of uses of oi were oe to begin with, and its pronunciation shifted from /wɛ/ to /wa/...
- For some reason these entries are rather inconsistent, and uses both oe and oë in the same breath, although the former more often than the latter.