An Introduction to French Pronunciation

The Vowels in Detail 61
– to substitute for /ø/ and /œ/ what seems to them to be the
nearest English equivalent, namely the vowel of bird, earn,
etc., as pronounced in those varieties of British English where
no trace of the r remains (so this does not apply to English
as spoken in south-west England, parts of Lancashire,
Scotland, Ireland or North America). (The symbol for this
is //, e.g. bird /b:d/, earn /:n/.) The way round this is to
keep the tongue position much as for /e/ and /ε/ while firmly
rounding the lips as for /o/ and /b/ (see 10.8): this should, at
the very least, produce sounds close enough to /ø/ and /œ/ to
be easily perfected by a little fine-tuning with the help of a
native-speaker.
10.7.2 It is in fact debatable whether /ø/ and /œ/ should
not be considered as allophones of the same phoneme rather
than as separate phonemes since the number of ‘minimal pairs’
(i.e. pairs of words distinguished only by the distinction
between these two sounds) is limited to two, viz:
veule /vø:l/ ‘feeble (character)’ ~ (ils) veulent /vœl/ ‘(they)
wish’;
(le) jeûne /ʒø:n/ ‘fast’ ~ jeune /ʒœn/ ‘young’.
Furthermore, (i) veule and jeûne are not commonly used
words, (ii) there would be no likelihood of confusion between
veule (adjective) and veulent (verb) or between jeûne (noun)
and jeune (adjective), and (iii) in any case, some speakers do
not observe the difference but pronounce veule and jeûne like
veulent and jeune.
However, purely on grounds of convenience, the two sounds
are here treated as phonemes.
With the exception of jeûne and of a few borrowings from
English (e.g. club /klœb/, pub /pœb/, brushing /brœʃiŋ/), the
spelling is always eu, œ or œu.
10.7.3 As in the case of /e/ and /ε/ (10.6), we shall
distinguish between stressed and unstressed syllables and, in
each case, between closed and open syllables.