Musa for French

I don't have to explain to you that French orthography is crazy - you learned that in school. In the words of the Grammaire du Français Contemporain; (Chevalier, Blanche-Benvenisse, Arrivé & Peytard; Larousse 1964,2002; §30):

«L'alphabet moderne français est composé de 26 lettres : a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z, empruntées au Latin (sauf le w, d'origine germanique).

Ces lettres sont divisées en VOYELLES (a, e, i, o, u, y) et CONSONNES. Elles correspondent très imparfaitement aux sons. Ainsi, un même et unique son peut être transcrit très différement par un ou plusiers lettres: fil, philtre. Elle est surtout le cas pour les voyelles : eau, auto, pot, des os, les bœufs - graphie dite E dans l'O -, meuglent. Inversement, une même lettre ou un même groupe de lettres peuvent correspondre à des sons très différents : les poules couvent dans le couvent, la ville brille, ou même ne correspondre à aucun son : sculpteur; c'est le cas de beaucoup de consonnes finales : outil, estomac, porc, loup.

L'apprentissage de l'orthographe, c'est à dire d'un graphie correcte, est par là un exercice long et redoutable.»

To this sad recapitulation by an authority I might add the inconvenience posed by the profusion of accents in French, e.g. ç é à è ù â ê î ô û ë etc., and their absence from many fonts and keyboards. And yet many French people, having wasted years of school mastering the arcane art of French orthography, view its irrationality as a mark of distinction and regard any attempts to reform it with suspicion and disdain.

As one would expect, the Musa alphabet offers one letter for each sound of French. The principle behind Musa is to keep the written language as close as possible to the spoken language. As a result, French in Musa has many homonyms: words that are written differently in the Roman alphabet but alike in Musa. But if French listeners can distinguish between "je l'ai fait cent fois" (I did it 100 times) and "je les fais sans foi" (I do them without faith) in speech, French readers can distinguish between them in writing.

Vowels

Here are the vowels of French, with examples of their use :

	si		su		ce		sous
	chez		ceux		sa		sot
	sait		soeur		sable¹		sol
	saint		un¹		cent		son

¹ distinguished in some dialects

Consonants

And here are the consonants, also with examples:

	bout		doux		gout
	pou		tout		coup
	vous		zut		joue
	fou		sou		chou
	mou		nous		agneau
	loup		roue		parking
	caillou		huit		oui

The guttural r sound is unvoiced next to unvoiced consonants:

	
bris	pris

It can also be pronounced as , , or  in some dialects.

Liaison and Elision

French combines words more than many other languages. In English, we contract it is and did not into it's and didn't, but French goes much further. There are two main mechanisms: liaison and elision. Both happen when a word begins with a vowel sound, and the result is to put a consonant in front of that vowel.

In the case of liaison, the added initial consonant is the final consonant of the preceding word: the final s in the word les is normally silent (but always written in the current French spelling), but becomes pronounced as a z when the following word starts with a vowel: lé + amis becomes léz amis. If the first word ends in a nasal vowel, it changes to an n: bõ + ami becomes bon ami. And sometimes they pick a consonant out of thin air: a + il becomes a t il.

In the case of elision, a weak vowel at the end of the first word is lost so that its preceding consonant can be used at the beginning of the second word: je + arrive becomes j arrive.

In Musa, we write the results of these processes. In the more complicated cases, you can have a whole series of small words:


il n'y en a pas

Unlike the traditional orthography, we don't write the liaison consonant at the end of the first word if it's not pronounced; we write ver, not vert. As a French speaker, you have to know when liaison occurs and when it doesn't, and which consonant is used.

Sample

Now that you've learned the letters, why don't you try reading a sentence?



Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.