Question regarding French liason after 'pas'

In My Humble Opinion
1

My inclination is to pronoune pas like ‘paz’ before
1.n’est pas habitué
2. n’est pas historique
3,…pas hésiter
4. …pas habituellement
I’d like to know if it’s correct to liaise ‘pas’ in the above examples. I’ve searched extensivekly for liaison rules following ‘pas’ but haven’t been able to turn up anything linking ‘pas’ with words beginning with ‘h’.

2

IANA native French speaker, but the FluentU French language and culture blog says that liaisons after “pas” are optional in general (and generally omitted), not just before “h”.

3

Thanks KImstu, that helps a lot.

4

OK with that.

5

I may liaise pas in “… n’est pas habitué”.

I would never liaise it in the other three examples (especially not in sentence 4). It sounds unnatural to me.

6

Thanks Moonrise. So perhaps it would best in general to avoid liaising a ‘pas’ with the above mentioned words and words starting with ‘h’. There seems to be so litttle guidance on this particular rule that I can find.

7

What about with ‘encore’ ? I seem to recall hearing pas encore both with and without liasion.

8

In my French training (taught by francophone teachers) we were taught to elide when a word starting with a vowel came after “pas” or a similar word. So it was always paz oncore. That doesn’t mean that it’s the case in all French dialects or regions.

9

I’m pretty sure I say /pa ɑ̃.kɔʁ/ but /paz ɑ̃.kɔʁ/ doesn’t strike me as wrong. It may depend on the context or, as Chefguy wrote, on the dialect. I’ve never really thought about this.

10

pas encore = not yet => with liaison
pas encore = not again => no liaison

11

It’s worth mentioning that there are two classes of words beginning with h:

  • h-aspiré (la hache, le homard)
  • h-muet (l’hiver, l’heure)
    The rules for elision and liaison differ between the two.
12

Thanks hibernicus. There is virtually nothing I could find in terms of the use of 'pas 'before either h-aspiré or h-mue. There is plenty on how to use them in every other respect.

13

No liaison for me in this case either but it could be my dialect.

14

Not a native French speaker but the rule is that you treat h-muet as if the h isn’t there at all, so it’s as if the word begins with a vowel. All the examples you give “habitué”, “historique”, “hésiter”, “habituellement” begin with h-muet so you should have a liaison from the previous word - pazabitué

If you had a word beginning with h-aspiré like “hardi” you should treat it as if it begins with a consonant - pa ardi.

I defer to the actual French speakers when it comes to how they actually speak, and they are telling us they don’t sound the s in any of those examples.

[Edited because my original example for h-aspiré was “habile”. Turns out that word is actually with h-muet so I changed the example to “hardi”. I should shut up now and leave it to those who know what they are talking about!]

15

Thanks hibernicus.