List of words with irregular pronunciations, with frequency information

Question

French, specifically fr-FR, has a remarkably consistent orthography.

If you know the rules, then given a written word, one should be able to pronounce it correctly even if you don't know what it means.

There are some exceptions which I'll classify as three types:

1. when you need to know the part of speech: e.g. -ent for third person plural verbs

2. when you need to know the context: e.g. poetry, singing, slang, deliberate mispronunciations for comedic or dramatic effect

3. actual exceptions, usually quite minor, like parasol where s is /s/ vs. /z/, or aigu where ai is /e/ vs. /ɛ/.

For those of type 3, I'm looking for a list with word frequency. Does anyone know of one available?

Answer 1

Although your statement is true comparatively with English pronunciation, I believe French is much more difficult to pronounce from the written form than, say, Italian or German.

One category you entirely disregard contains spellings with letters that should or shoud not be pronounced: net and un jet, une vis and un avis,...

You mention that you are looking for a list of rules and exception, probably you should have a look at the literature about speech synthesis, which may use such a list.