contraction rules

[Joakim Rosqvist]

Apparently, the French don't like it when one word ends with a vowel and the next begins with a vowel. There are many tricks to avoid such "collisions".  Then, I found this sentence:

Est-ce que tu aimes le chocolat ?

The vowels here are all pronounced, so how come there is no need to use a trick like

t'aimes  or tu-t-aimes to avoid the collision ?

[George Hunt]

I think you can pronounce it like that  but is is a bit "slang"

For example :" Est-ce que t'aimes le chocolat " might be heard (and written) ,I think.

[Neil Coffey]

Firstly: it arguably isn't so much that French doesn't like having a word ending in a vowel followed by another starting with a vowel. You could argue that the condition is more that French has evolved to have a slight preference for syllables made up of consonant-vowel (rather than, say, just a vowel, or consonant-vowel-consonant).

But, however you analyse it, the important thing to realise is that this is just one of many "preferences" or pressures on the language. You could argue that if the language evolved to elide vowels in more cases, such as this, then it would fit in with the preference of avoiding two adjacent vowels/keeping certain syllable structures. On the other hand, the language is also evolving in the face of other competing pressures-- the language may avoid two adjacent vowels, but not at the expense of every other preference.

In this specific case, there's maybe pressure for "tu aimes" not to evolve to "t'aimes", because then it sounds a little like "t'aime" (as in "loves you"). And there's pressure for the language not to "solve the problem" by evolving "tu aimes" to (say) "tu z'aimes" (adding a liaison consonant, just as you do in e.g. "les_enfants"), perhaps because other consonants already occur in this place and when they do they tend to be interpreted as pronouns (e.g. if you make the consonant a "m" then it means "me": "tu m'aimes").

That said... as it turns out, in very informal speech, "tu" is actually sometimes elided to "t'". In other words, it *is* possible to pronounce "tu aimes?" as "t'aimes?" (it's probably rare with "est-ce que", though). However, this phenomenon is restricted to very informal speech, and is most common with "t'as" (=tu as) and "t'es" (tu es). It's possible, but less common, with other verbs.

[Antoine Olivier]

Contracting is just more common language.