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I asked my French teacher last time, and she said she didn't know, but she will ask. Can anyone give clear and simple reason for this?

Evpok
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samayo
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2 Answers2

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The attachment of O and E (or of other letters) is called a typographic ligature. Ligatures were often used in ancient languages (such Latin and ancient Greek) to mark a diphthong or sometimes simply to make writing easier in pre-press times.

In modern French, the œ ligature is linguistic as opposed to aesthetic. It bears an important linguistic role, mainly because oe and œ are not pronounced the same. When you have an œ in your word, you will not pronounce the o and the e separately, like you would in coefficient, for example. As a rule of thumb, words of Latin origin will pronounce œ as /œ/ or /ø/ 1 (for example œuf, sœur, œil, cœur) and words of Greek origin will pronounce it /e/ (like fœtus, Phœnix, Œdipe). There are also a few words that pronounce it as /ɛ/ (like œstrogène).

1 This is IPA for French, if you don't know it, there's a nice chart on Wikipedia.

Kareen
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    It isn't a typographic ligature (or the substitution would be optional and could be systematic), it is a linguistic ligature. – Un francophone Jan 18 '13 at 22:03
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    @Unfrancophone Œ in and of itself is a typographic ligature, which in French is not purely aesthetic. I was talking about it in general, hence the new paragraph about modern French, but I will edit to make it clearer. – Kareen Jan 18 '13 at 22:57
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    @Unfrancophone: I was about to make this same remark, before you posted it. Eventually, I abstained. It's a lexical (or linguistic) ligature and it's not purely æsthetic… but of course it is typographic. How could it not be? – Stéphane Gimenez Jan 18 '13 at 23:11
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    @StéphaneGimenez, It is the traditional usage, see for instance Orthotypographie "Voilà pourquoi je préfère la distinction traditionnelle entre ligatures « linguistiques ou orthographiques » et ligatures « esthétiques ou typographiques » " and further he makes a distinction between "fi" and "ct" calling the first "technique" and the second "esthétique". Here is one source in English making the difference between lexical and typographic ligature. – Un francophone Jan 19 '13 at 08:32
  • I am confused. If it is a linguistic ligature, why is it often omitted? I usually see it as "oeuf" or "coeur." – temporary_user_name Jan 19 '13 at 20:51
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    @Aerovistae I would say for the same reason you see other kinds of misspellings - people don't know. They think it doesn't matter if you use the ligature or not, and in your every day life it probably doesn't, but it remains a grammatical error. – Kareen Jan 19 '13 at 21:20
  • Wow, even in professional novels? That's amazing. – temporary_user_name Jan 20 '13 at 00:49
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    @Aerovistae, if the text has been professionally edited, that's surprising. But a sad fact is that more and more editors are taking electronic source from authors and skipping on the human corrector phase. An additional factor Kareen forgot is common with accent on uppercase letters, they are missing from typewriters and computer keyboard (in the later case you have to look for the key combinations and memorize them), combined with the fact that some character encodings used up to the mid 2000's were missing "œ" (but not "æ"). – Un francophone Jan 20 '13 at 06:28
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    BTW, the story about the fact that "œ" is missing from IS-8859-1 is that the French representative didn't know it was a linguistic ligature and agreed to its removal. – Un francophone Jan 20 '13 at 06:44
  • @Aerovistae - anpther reason why you don't see it that often is many software simply doesn't support it (not to mention keyboards or the combination of both), although it's getting better. – Simon Mourier Jan 20 '13 at 11:15
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    this is a really old post I know, but I wanted to say the Œ from Œdipe is pronounced as ø in France – Flying_whale Oct 18 '18 at 09:37
  • Should I use it when handwriting as well? – Alan Evangelista Jun 06 '19 at 10:13
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    @AlanEvangelista Ideally, yes. You basically just have to make the letters touch, doesn't have to be anything fancy. – Kareen Jun 06 '19 at 18:24
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Essentially, the "oe" together tells you how that vowel is to be pronounced, as in the word "œuvre". Think of it as an extra vowel that has it's own distinct spoken sound (pronunciation). I remember learning this in elementary school. Hope that helps.

LeMontréalais
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LeMontréalais
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  • But isn't "œuvre" pronounced the same as "euvre" would be? I didn't think it has its own pronunciation; ""œu" seems to just have the same pronunciations as "eu" – sumelic Aug 01 '17 at 18:26