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French orthography encompasses the spelling and punctuation of the French language.It is based on a combination of phonemic and historical principles. The spelling of words is largely based on the pronunciation of Old French c. 1100 –1200 AD, and has stayed more or less the same since then, despite enormous changes to the pronunciation of the language in the intervening years.
Misspellings in French are a subset of errors in French orthography. Many errors are caused by homonyms; for example, French contains hundreds of words ending with IPA [εn] written as -ène, -en, -enne or -aine. [1] Many French words end with silent consonants, lettres muettes, creating, in effect, homonyms.
French phonology is the sound system of French.This article discusses mainly the phonology of all the varieties of Standard French.Notable phonological features include the uvular r present in some accents, nasal vowels, and three processes affecting word-final sounds:
à la short for (ellipsis of) à la manière de; in the manner of/in the style of [1]à la carte lit. "on the card, i.e. menu". In restaurants it refers to ordering individual dishes from the menu rather than a fixed-price meal.
A profound change in very late spoken Latin (Vulgar Latin, the forerunner of all the Romance languages) was the restructuring of the vowel system of Classical Latin.Latin had thirteen distinct vowels: ten pure vowels (long and short versions of a, e, i, o, u ), and three diphthongs ( ae, oe, au ). [2]
The Gaulish language, and presumably its many dialects and closely allied sister languages, left a few hundred words in French and many more in nearby Romance languages, i.e. Franco-Provençal (Eastern France and Western Switzerland), Occitan (Southern France), Catalan, Romansch, Gallo-Italic (Northern Italy), and many of the regional languages of northern France and Belgium collectively known ...
The phonemes /u/ and /uː/ are not distinct in modern French of France or in modern Quebec French; the spelling <oû> was the /uː/ phoneme, but croûte is pronounced with a short /u/ in modern French of France and in modern Quebec French. In Quebec French, the phoneme /uː/ is used only in loanwords: cool.
In English, eau only exists in words borrowed from French, and so is pronounced similarly in almost all cases (like in plateau, bureau).Exceptions include beauty and words derived from it, where it is pronounced /juː/, bureaucrat where it is pronounced /ə/, bureaucracy where it is pronounced /ɒ/, [4] and (in some contexts) the proper names Beaulieu and Beauchamp (as /juː/ and /iː ...