If you’ve taken a few basic French classes, you probably remember being taught that the h It is not pronounced in French. So hour (“time, hour”) and Eure (the name of a French river and department) are pronounced identically. You were probably taught then that a word beginning with h behaves as if it began with a vowel so that, for example, “the time” is weatherNo *The time, just as “the water” is Water and no *Water. And in Threes hours (“three hours, three o’clock”), the s the following vowel is pronounced first, as it would be in Threes trees (“three trees”).
But it turns out that this is not the whole story. It is true that in standard French, the h is always “silence”. But in a few words, the h still represents a special “feature”: it counts as a consonant when deciding whether to pronounce the s (or another consonant) that comes before, and also when deciding whether to use she Prayed ME’ (Prayed of).
So how does this work? Well the masculine words hero (“hero”) and sea urchin (“hedgehog”) are examples of these special words. Looking at them, you may have expected the French for “the hero” and “the hedgehog” to be *the hero Y *the Hedgehog. But in these cases, the words behave as if they actually began with a consonant, even though the h it’s “silent”, and that’s what francophones say the hero Y the Hedgehog. If you’ve heard of the movie. Hatredyou may have wondered why it is not hatred. Good, hatred (“hate”) is one of these special words!
Linguists call this phenomenon “aspirating h” Prayed “h aspirated” (this misleading term derives from the fact that, in the history of language, the h was pronounced or “aspirated” in some of these words). Other common examples with an “aspirated h” include: the ax (“axis”), hatred (“coverage”), the village (“Village”), herring (“herring”), chance (“chance, luck, fate”), Locust (“Locust”), shame (“shame”) along with eight (“eight”), tall (“tall stature”). So in the expression aloft (“at the top, above”), the No because tall has a “suck h“. (In eighteenAs you probably know, the X pronounced: “di-z-(h)uit”.)
There are some other complications with these words. A particular difficulty is that there is some variation from speaker to speaker as to which words receive an “aspirate”. So some speakers will say the bean (“the bean”) while others the bean; some will say The dutch (“the Dutchman”) while others The dutch.
It also turns out that the so-called “aspirated h“the word doesn’t even have to be spelled with one letter h! Words eleven Y yogurt (“yogurt”), and often foreign words beginning with a vowel all behave as if they begin with an “aspirate”. h“, and so you say for example 11 of September, yogurtand the s not pronounced in the eleven people, the yogurt(s) (While noting that it is in thes eyes). These special cases are generally words that begin with a “glide” or semivowel. They can be written with a ‘w’, ‘y’ or a combination of what are traditionally classified as “vowel” letters. Other examples include the yambo, the wadding, yoga, western, the wiki…
We have given a brief overview here of what is actually a rather complex area of French pronunciation. If you’re a relative beginner, it pays to be aware of this phenomenon without getting bogged down. Advanced students will have fun tackling the complexities…