I know that "anniversaire" is masculine but the phrase is pronounced "bonne anniversaire." How is it supposed to be written-- "bon" or "bonne"?

Bon anniversaire.
Like "bon enfant", it is also pronounced like bonne there too.
Or you can say "joyeux anniversaire".

It's a bit like "a" and "an" in English. If the word after "bon" starts with a vowel, it's is pronounced like "bonne". If the word starts with a consonant, it's pronounced like "bon". This concept works with most of the words in French.

It's called "liaison" and it's a purely phonetic concept which is not present in written French.

Sylvain,
So glad you joined in. Tell us more about liaison (or steer us to a good website or book about it).
For example, when Frédéric Mitterand drawls: "mais alors --" putting a "z" between the two words, it that what everyone should say, or is it pretentious, or both?
And the slight "r" between "premier" and "étage"…

It depends more or less about the ease of pronunciation. If the liaison is more easy to speak, one should do it without worrying about it. I think the liaison existence is because it is difficult to pronounce 2 vowels without any consonant in between.

In the case of Frederic Mitterand, it's a bit pretentious but I think he uses it to emphasize certain part of a sentence.

One of the difficulty of the liaison is that one must know how to spell a word to use it. One amusing thing! In political speech, they always say "les françaises et les français vont ..." and not "les français et les françaises vont ...". Try the second one with the liaison between français and et, it sounds odd.


For "premier étage", I think most of the speakers will use the liaison.

Ah - my topic! Liaison frequently becomes an issue when dealing with sung or declaimed French. The (older, classic) general rule - and this basically goes for classical theatre, opera, etc. - is that most are obligatory, although there is some room for choice.

Vernacular pronunciation is quite a different matter. Most french speakers react negatively to hearing lots of liaisons - they sound pretentious or over-fussy. It is interesting that this point of view has trickled into stage usage so that, more and more, you hear fewer "obligatory" liaisons in theatrical texts.

You can probably tell that my perspective is a bit old-school. I admit that I like them - they feel good to say - they make the language flow more with fewer glottal stops - IMO, they're more elegant. I understand that using them makes one sound more pretentious as well, but for stage use, I think that you hear the language better if they're used.

Another similar issue for stage speech concerns "r"s - in vernacular French, for the most part, of course, they are rolled in the back of the throat. For stage speech, however, it is traditional to trill them with the front of the tongue, as one does in Italian or Spanish! However, mostly from French speakers, you hear more and more r's rolled in the back of the throat in opera these days - a point of contention among the purists! Interesting issues.

David, you touched on my pet subject, my baby, mon truc, my violon d'Ingrat…
For me, using the liaison wrong - in places where a liaison does not apply - is worse than omitting to use it right, but of course using it right is a delight to the ears.
Let me give an example in … English!
I have been watching a lot of election coverage in the English-speaking TV channels. On CNN's last "on the Campaign Trail" before the vote, a "pundit" said repeatedly "whomever wins will have to blablabla". You see how using "whom" wrong makes one cringe, whereas not using it right is only, let's say, excusably populist these days, in the subjective opinion of this non-native speaker of English…
Ceci dit, David, Sylvain, can you steer us to a website or a publication that gives the precise rules to liaison? L'euphonie is an excellent point but is soooo subjective and maybe inaccessible to non-native speakers.

I can only direct you to wikipedia

English

French

The French article seems acurate, I just briefly looked at the English one which seems to be mostly a translation.

Thank you, Sylvain, for the link. I printed it out to study what to say and especially what not to say.
Doru, I was not able to reply to your PM. I hope it is ok to reply here: "violon d'ingrat" was my own pun on "violon d'Ingres". The latter, as you know, means one's forte, or personal expertise.

For me, the bible of french lyric pronunciation is Pierre Bernac's "The Interpretation of French Song." There are also other good french diction textbooks - one by Thomas Grubb and a new one that covers diction for singers in french, italian and german by David Adams. Liaison is frequently debated in singer circles. My french diction guru from my undergraduate years frequently had us do "light" elisions when we wanted to be technically correct, but not bring too much attention to a big ol' sloppy liaison.

I totally agree, AinP, that often, no elision is better than an incorrect one. And also that in normal, everyday spoken french, many liaisons just sound pretentious. However, your example.... hm.... isn't that more of a grammatical issue? If you say "whomever," when in fact "whoever" is correct, doesn't that point to an incorrect understanding of when it's appropriate to use "who" and "whom" as opposed to an issue of elision? I'm not sure the parallel works in English.

At any rate, hope this helps. I have to look at that Wikipedia page now.

The Wikipedia article appears to be pretty comprehensive - and very detailed.

I was interested to find out that, for formal speech, there are even more obligatory liaisons than I knew about (and some of them, frankly, sound stilted even to me!). I'm glad that it mentions optional liaisons - the fact that many are optional encourages discussion - and disagreement among both normal users as well as "authorities." In my experience, discussions like that are frequent in french lyric diction classes.

Very interesting stuff!