I studied French for years in high school and never thought about this until I was helping my 13-year-old with his homework last night. The “e” in “très” is pronounced eɪ so I would have thought it would be spelled “trés.” I probably would’ve gotten it right if I weren’t thinking about it so hard. But why is it this way and how do I explain this to help him remember it?
I pronounce “très” something like [tʁɛ], so the vowel sound is definitely a [ɛ]. Something like [tʁe] or [tʁeɪ] sounds odd to me (actually, [tɹeɪ] would sound like “très” pronounced with an American accent), but I guess it may be seen in some French dialects. Nevertheless, the spelling reflects a correct pronunciation, and I would say probably the standard one.
French pronunciation, like English, doesn’t make much sense. You can form some rules to help him learn, but there will always be exceptions.
In the case of French, I believe it is often used as a disambiguation, to distinguish it from similar words with a different meaning (e.g., “a,” a conjugation of avoir, and "à."0. It doesn’t apply to modern French with très, but possibly it did before a shift in spelling?
‘Très’ is definitely not pronounced the same as ‘trés’. Additionally, accents can be used to distinguish homophones with different meaning: consider ‘ou’ meaning “or” versus ‘où’ meaning “where”.
Thanks for inserting the IPA characters – that’s how I hear it. Same phoneme as in the word “mais” or so many others.
As above, who knows why there’s an accent? Linguists probably guess and they might be right, some of the time, but how can one explain any little spelling quirk adequately to all people?
The word descends from Latin “trans” (“across”, sometimes “thoroughly”). In Old French, it did have the accent aigu – that is, pronounced with more of a “smile” (though still no “ee” sound at the end – that’s your English interference at work). By Modern French times, the vowel had “relaxed” a bit, to the e-with-accent-grave we hear (and see) today – that is, a bit closer to “eh” than to “ay-without-the-ee-at-the-end” (accent aigu), though the exact pronunciation varies across the French-speaking world (I think Quebeckers might tend to dipthongize somewhat, for example.)
Where I live (Paris) there can be a clear and audible difference between “trés” (as in “illettrés”) and “très” (or “trait”), but a lot of people don’t actually mark that difference very clearly or consistently.
This point might be more obvious with lait/les nait/nez fait/fée etc
The “ai” sound often morphs into the “é” sound, particularly with verbs, where you often don’t know from pronunciation alone whether someone is using an imparfait or a passé composé - or maybe I should say imparfé or a passait composait 
English speakers may hear (and/or speak) très as /tʁe/ instead of /tʁɛ/ because English phonotactics doesn’t permit lax vowels in word-final position.
Exactly. It sounds/feels weird to an English speaker to end a word with a lax vowel, so we tend to “hear” the grave* and aigu “e’s” as sounding the same.
*Including in words like “mais”, not just words that literally have a marked “grave”
CookingWithGas, your kid needs to learn something that is often not taught by American French teachers, namely that a lot of those endings that we Americans pronounce with a generic “ay” sound are not the same. “-ez,” for example, is pronounced like “é,”, while “-ais” is pronounced like “è.” I was taught in junior high school (wrongly, of course) that it was the same sound. And it didn’t help that I learned most of my French in Africa, where the difference between the two sounds isn’t terribly marked. It’s actually worth learning which of these endings – and there are a fair number them – are which.
So who finally set me right, overcoming my incredulity after so many years of being wrong? Why, people on the Dope! Take a bow, Hypnagogic Jerk!
A good English–French dictionary, or a French grammar (written in English), should include such a list with an IPA pronunciation key. I don’t have it with me now, but I’m pretty sure that the Collins Gem French Grammar has such a list.
As I understood it, a lot of the accents are the result of shortcuts/shorthand by medieval scribes? (Note how a lot of French words are much like English but the include the “S” where they throw in a “^”. )
But the question with the circumflex is “Which came first, the spelling or the pronunciation?”
I wasn’t aware of that. Thanks, it’s interesting.
Not in “très”; the vowel sound is pretty much a pure [ɛ]. We do have more diphthongs than European French speakers. (Aren’t diphthongs basically absent from most European French dialects?)
Why thank you!
That’s the case with almost all circumflex accents (a handful are used to distinguish words that’d otherwise be homographs), but grave and acute accents are rarely used for this reason.
CWG, note that while native English speakers might use the /eɪ/ diphthong to pronounce this word, French doesn’t use the glide.
This always amuses me. I was buying cat food yesterday, and the can said, in a fancy font, “pâté”. I thought, “paste… yeah, that’s just about right.”
Seriously? US French teachers teach that “mais” is pronounced more like “may” than “meh”? I am amazed.
But are you amézed, or amèzed? Anyway, I don’t want to speak for all French teachers, but a certain number, let’s say – including my junior high school French teacher – didn’t make (or perhaps didn’t know of) the distinction between the two sounds.
Please teach me: is a lax vowel in the final position like the sound which ends the informal, ‘meh’ (a sound of indifference or contempt)?
Très bon! But do note that French vowels are a bit more close than American ones. That [ɛ] actually sounds a bit more like [e].
It’s a bit like how [aɪ] (AH-ih)sounds like [ai] (AH-ee).