Je → j' : l'élision autour du verbe

Unité GR-57 · campagne 4 · j'aime, j'habite, je hais — je n'ai pas, je l'ai vu, qu'il vienne.

The oral automatisms (GR-46) train elision as a sound: the chain je ne l'ai pas said in one breath. This page is its written side: which small words lose their vowel in front of a verb, when, and the handful of verbs that refuse it.

The rule

A short word ending in e or a drops that vowel — and takes an apostrophe — when the next word starts with a vowel sound. Around the verb, the words concerned are:

A vowel sound means a vowel letter, or an h muet — the silent h of most French words: j'habite, j'hésite, il s'habille, je l'héberge.

H aspiré: the verbs that refuse

A few words start with an h that is not pronounced either, but still blocks elision and liaison — the h aspiré. You cannot hear it, so it has to be known. The verbs a learner meets:

Dictionaries mark them, usually with an asterisk or an apostrophe in front of the headword.

What does not elide

• tu never elides in writing — tu as, tu es. The spoken t'as, t'es are recognised, never written.
• si elides only before il and ils — s'il, but si elle, si on.
• qui never elides — la personne qui arrive.
• nous and vous never elide — nous y allons.
• After an affirmative imperative, le and la stay full: prends-le avec toi.

Elision inside a chain

Every word of a pronoun chain obeys the rule on its own, so a chain can elide twice:

• Je n'y en ai plus. — ne before y.
• *Je ne **l'*ai pas vu. — le before ai.
• *Je **te l'*avais dit. — te stays (a consonant follows), le elides.
• *Il ne **s'*est jamais trompé. — se before est.

Where each pronoun of the chain goes is on Où va le pronom ?.

The opposite device: -t-

When a question inverts a verb ending in a vowel and il, elle, on, French does not elide — it adds a t between them, with hyphens: A-t-il fini ? Va-t-elle venir ? Parle-t-on français ici ? Nothing is dropped; a sound is inserted instead.

The errors to watch

If your first language is Russian

Russian has no elision: every word keeps its full spelling. French writes the sound — the apostrophe is where a vowel was lost — so the written form follows the spoken chain. When you hesitate, say the phrase aloud: if je + aime comes out as one syllable [ʒɛm], it is written j'aime.

The spoken reductions — j'suis [ʃɥi], j'sais pas [ʃepa] — go further than writing ever does: recognise them when you hear them; never write them.

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