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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.
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 "à la carte" rather than a fixed-price meal "menu".
For a guide to adding IPA characters to Wikipedia articles, see Template:IPA and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation § Entering IPA characters. French has no word-level stress so stress marks should not be used in transcribing French words. See French phonology and French orthography for a more thorough look at the sounds of French.
English words of French origin can also be distinguished from French words and expressions used by English speakers. Although French is derived mainly from Latin, which accounts for about 60% of English vocabulary either directly or via a Romance language, it includes words from Gaulish and Germanic languages, especially Old Frankish. Since ...
Word stress is not distinctive in French, so two words cannot be distinguished based on stress placement alone. Grammatical stress is always on the final full syllable (syllable with a vowel other than schwa) of a word. Monosyllables with schwa as their only vowel (ce, de, que, etc.) are generally clitics but otherwise may receive stress. [38]
There are a few words that English has recently borrowed from contemporary French. The pronunciation of these English words is generally an approximation to that of the French word (the French use or in terms of the International Phonetic Alphabet). English-speakers use a variety of substitutions for these sounds.
This article should specify the language of its non-English content, using {}, {{transliteration}} for transliterated languages, and {} for phonetic transcriptions, with an appropriate ISO 639 code. Wikipedia's multilingual support templates may also be used.
The period from 1250 to 1400 was the most prolific for borrowed words from French. Forty percent of all the French words in English appear for the first time between these two dates. [12] After this period, the scale of the lexical borrowing decreased sharply, though French loan words have continued to enter English even into the modern era.