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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.
Many French words and verb endings end with silent consonants, lettres muettes, creating also homonyms are spelled differently but pronounced identically: tu parles, il parle, ils parlent, or confusion of je parlais instead of je parlai. [2] Homonyms also occur with accents il eut dit compared with il eût dit.
In written French, elision (both phonetic and orthographic) is obligatory for the following words: the definite articles le and la. le garçon ("the boy"), la fille ("the girl") le + arbre → l'arbre ("the tree"), la + église → l'église ("the church") the subject pronouns je and ce (when they occur before the verb) Je dors. ("I sleep") Ce ...
In US spellings, silent letters are sometimes omitted (e.g., acknowledgment / UK acknowledgement, ax / UK axe, catalog / UK catalogue, program / UK programme outside computer contexts), but not always (e.g., dialogue is the standard spelling in the US and the UK; dialog is regarded as a US variant; the spelling axe is also often used in the US).
Doubling a final l and adding a silent e (e.g., gentil → gentille) adds a [j] sound if the l is preceded by the letter i. Some monosyllabic function words ending in a or e, such as je and que, drop their final vowel when placed before a word that begins with a vowel sound (thus avoiding a hiatus). The missing vowel is replaced by an apostrophe.
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Silent final consonants may be pronounced, in some syntactic contexts, when the following word begins with a vowel or non-aspirated h. It is important to note that many words with silent final consonants have utterly lost them, e.g. neither the 'n' in million nor the 't' in art is ever pronounced. A liaison should not be made just because a ...
The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet. [note 7] For this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither: for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ʔ , originally had the form of a question mark with the dot removed.
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