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  2. French orthography - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_orthography

    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.

  3. Glossary of French words and expressions in English

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_French_words...

    "[be] on [your] guard". "On guard" is of course perfectly good English: the French spelling is used for the fencing term. en passant in passing; term used in chess and in neurobiology ("synapse en passant.") En plein air en plein air lit. "in the open air"; particularly used to describe the act of painting outdoors. en pointe en pointe (in ...

  4. Reforms of French orthography - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_French_orthography

    Spelling and punctuation before the 16th century was highly erratic, but the introduction of printing in 1470 provoked the need for uniformity.. Several Renaissance humanists (working with publishers) proposed reforms in French orthography, the most famous being Jacques Peletier du Mans who developed a phonemic-based spelling system and introduced new typographic signs (1550).

  5. List of English words of French origin - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of...

    It excludes combinations of words of French origin with words whose origin is a language other than French — e.g., ice cream, sunray, jellyfish, killjoy, lifeguard, and passageway— and English-made combinations of words of French origin — e.g., grapefruit (grape + fruit), layperson (lay + person), mailorder, magpie, marketplace, surrender ...

  6. Phonological history of French - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_French

    French also shows enormous phonetic changes between the Old French period and the modern language. Spelling, however, has barely changed, which accounts for the wide differences between current spelling and pronunciation. Some of the most profound changes have been: The loss of almost all final consonants.

  7. History of French - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_French

    French is a Romance language (meaning that it is descended primarily from Vulgar Latin) that specifically is classified under the Gallo-Romance languages.. The discussion of the history of a language is typically divided into "external history", describing the ethnic, political, social, technological, and other changes that affected the languages, and "internal history", describing the ...

  8. Talk : Glossary of French words and expressions in English

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Glossary_of_French...

    An (admittedly) quick web search shows that it's been in use in English since about 1640, and comes from an obsolete spelling of the French word "faible". If a word that has been used in English for almost 400 years(and isn't even used in modern French in its English spelling) is going to be in the list, we're going to have to add thousands more.

  9. List of French words of Germanic origin - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_words_of...

    The following list details words, affixes and phrases that contain Germanic etymons. Words where only an affix is Germanic (e.g. méfait, bouillard, carnavalesque) are excluded, as are words borrowed from a Germanic language where the origin is other than Germanic (for instance, cabaret is from Dutch, but the Dutch word is ultimately from Latin/Greek, so it is omitted).