An Introduction to French Pronunciation

5
5.1 General
The Semi-Consonants
The Semi-Consonants 27
5.1.1 French has three ‘sounds’ (whether they are phonemes
or allophones is discussed briefly below, 5.1.2) that do not
fall clearly into the category either of vowels or of consonants.
Two of these correspond approximately to (though
they are not totally identical with) the English w of was, wet,
etc., and the English y of yes, you, layer, toy, etc. The third
(see 5.1.4) has no equivalent in English or indeed in most
other languages.
The three sounds in question are pronounced by raising the
tongue even higher than for the three high vowels /i/, /y/ and
/u/, but not so high as to cause the degree of friction characterizing
fricative consonants (see 6.7) such as /f/, /v/, /s/, /z/,
etc.
5.1.2 We can therefore consider the three sounds in question
as semi-consonants corresponding to the three high
vowels and assign to each its own symbol. There are, in fact,
strong arguments in favour of the view that they should be
classified not as phonemes but as semi-consonantal allophones
of the vowels /i/, /y/ and /u/. However, for our immediate
practical purposes it is more convenient to treat them as
phonemes.