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The apostrophe is commonly taught to come so that vowels don't come close to each other.
This is not stated precisely, and you might be misunderstanding. The apostrophe is a consequence of the pronunciation. What happens in French is that in some cases, two vowel sounds can't be next to each other, so the first one is removed. The apostrophe is used to ...
answered Jan 14 at 18:03
Gilles 'SO nous est hostile'
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This use of the apostrophe goes back to Old French, at a point when the final /ə/ of any word was always pronounced, unless it was followed by a vowel, in which case it was systematically elided.
In this respect, this means that le (and any other word used with the apostrophe, like se, que, je, si, de, la or (at the time) ma or sa) would have had the exact ...
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The simple reason is that in "le" the e is not silent, whereas in "une" the e is silent e.
le [lə]
une [yn]
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The apostrophe's aren't simply "used", they are used for a purpose.
In French, as in English, apostrophes can be used to indicate that some letters have been omitted. For instance:
la école → l'école — the "a_" has been replace by the apostrophe.
do not → don't — the "o_" has been replaced by the apostrophe.
In the case of &...
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The purpose of the elision between two words is to avoid a hiatus. There's no hiatus in une école since it is pronounced [yne'kɔl], the final e in une is not sounded.
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