Enchainement is also observed for pronounced (in contrast to the silent ones of this section) word-final consonants when followed by a vowel-initial word in connected speech, as in cher ami [ʃɛ.ʁa.mi] ("dear friend").
Pedagogical grammars naturally emphasize what is mandatory or forbidden, and these two categories tend to be artificially inflated by traditional prescriptive rules.
Any discussion of liaison must take both descriptive and prescriptive perspectives into account, because this is an area of French grammar where speakers can consciously control their linguistic behavior out of an awareness of how their speech diverges from what is considered "correct".
The consonant [t] is obligatorily realized between the finite verb and a vowel-initial subject pronoun (il(s), elle(s) or on) in inversion constructions.
Orthographically, the two words are joined by a hyphen, or by -t- if the verb does not end in -t or -d: The written linking consonant -t- is necessary for 3rd person singular verbs whose orthographic form ends in a letter other than -t or -d. This situation arises in the following cases: The appearance of this consonant in modern French can be described as a restoration of the Latin 3rd person singular ending -t, under the influence of other French verbs that have always maintained final -t. The earliest examples of this analogical t in writing date to the mid-15th century, although this practice (and the corresponding pronunciation) was not fully accepted by grammarians until the 17th century.
The conscious or semi-conscious application of prescriptive rules leads to errors of hypercorrection in formal speech situations (see discussion below).
Conversely, in informal styles, speakers will semi-consciously avoid certain optional liaisons in order not to sound "pedantic" or "stilted".
Numerals that lack a final orthographic 's' may sometimes be followed by an epenthetic /z/, as in 'cinq-z-amis' /sɛ̃k.za.mi/, to form a fausse liaison (or 'pataquès') in colloquial/non-formal speech and in some modern popular songs, a common practice for children or in imitations of their spoken language by adults.
Liaison errors are perceived in the same way as omissions of disjunction, suggesting an "uncultivated" speaker or extremely informal speech.
Such an error is sometimes called cuir (‘leather’) when the inserted consonant is /.t/, velours (‘velvet’) when it is /.z/, although dictionaries do not all agree on these terms: The reading of poetry (whether said or sung) requires that all liaisons be used (except those described above as impossible), even those of -e's in the second-person singular as well as the reading of all necessary "null e's" (see the French article on poetry for more details).
It has been pointed out that French politicians and speakers (Jacques Chirac, for example) pronounce some liaison consonants, independently of the following word, introducing a pause or a schwa afterwards.
Liaison is therefore a phonological process occurring at word boundaries, specifically an external sandhi phenomenon that may be disrupted in pausa.
French liaison and enchainement are essentially the same external sandhi process, where liaison represents the fixed, grammaticalized remnants of the phenomenon before the fall of final consonants, and enchainement is the regular, modern-day continuation of the phenomenon, operating after the fall of former final consonants.
Whereas enchainement occurs in all places in a sentence, liaison is restricted to within sense units (groupes rythmiques) and are strictly forbidden across these intonational boundaries.
This implies that liaison, like enchainement, is restricted by open juncture, and in general, resyllabified consonants maintain their articulatory traits as if not in onset position.
When that consonant became mute (like the majority of ancient final consonants in French), the word continued to be written grant (the preservation of this written form is explained by other reasons; see note), and then became grand by influence of its Latin etymology grandis, with a new (analogic) feminine form grande.
The root grand is written thus regardless of whether the d is pronounced [d], [t] or it is silent, in order for its derivatives to have a single graphic identity, which facilitates memorization and reading.
However, the ancient final [t] of grand did not cease to be pronounced when the following word began with a vowel and belonged to the same sense unit.
If grand homme is analyzed as /ɡʁɑ̃.tɔm/, the ear in fact understands /ˈɡʁɑ̃.tɔm/, a continuous group of phonemes whose tonic accent signals that they form a unit.
The other cases are explained in a similar fashion: sang, for example, was pronounced [sɑ̃ŋk] (and written sanc) in Old French, but the final -g has replaced the -c in order to recall the Latin etymology, sanguis, and derivatives like sanguinaire, sanguin.
One must be aware, firstly, that word-final -x is a medieval shorthand for -us (in Old French people wrote chevax for chevaus, later written chevaux when the idea behind this -x was forgotten) (except in words like voix and noix where 's' was changed to 'x' by restoration of Latin usage (vox and nux)).
From the sixteenth century onward, it was common for grammarians who wished to describe the French language or discuss its orthography to write documents in a phonetic alphabet.
For example, the Prayer by Gilles Vaudelin (a document compiled in 1713 using a phonetic alphabet, and introduced in the Nouvelle manière d'écrire comme on parle en France ["A New Way of Writing as We Speak in France"]), probably representative of oral language, maybe rural, of the time, shows the absence of the following liaisons (Vaudelin's phonetic alphabet is transcribed using equivalent IPA): An earlier version of this article was translated from the French Wikipedia.