Post History

This are a lot of details as to how French was pronounced, so I'll focus on just this question:

>When looking at a song (or poem) and deciding on pronunciations, what internal or external clues can I rely on?

The most important thing to know is if the orthography is modernized or not. If the orthography is modernized, as it usually is, there is really no way to know based on the text itself.

If the text *isn't* modernized, the orthography still isn't always a good clue to how to pronounce it. The pronunciation of French can't be determined from the orthography unless you learn many words individually, and this is as true for Modern French as for Middle and Early Modern French. A 17th century Frenchman would have written *mesme* and *françois* instead of modern *même* and *français*, but in these cases, your pronunciation would be more accurate if you just adopted the modern pronunciation of the word instead of reading it as it's written. But in Old French, the same words *were* pronounced as they were written.

This isn't to say that the orthography didn't change drastically over the centuries, just that its changes don't often correlate with changes in pronunciation. For example, the fact that *faict* gained a *c* or *trosne* gained an *s* in Middle French wasn't because of a pronunciation change. On the other hand, variant spellings in Old French often do reflect real variants.

In other words, apart from knowing when the text was written (and even then!), it's hard to know the pronunciation of a French song at the time it was written without having a large vocabulary and good knowledge of etymology, effectively learning French and its history word by word.

On the other hand, if the only need for accurate pronunciation is to sing it in a choir, you could sing as modern French people sing old poetry, as in pronouncing *Frère Jacques* as /fʁɛʁə ʒakə/ instead of /fʁɛʁ ʒak/ to fit the meter of the song. Arguably, since the modern pronunciation rarely interferes with the rhyme, the meter is the most important thing to preserve.