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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.
The doublet of français and François in modern French orthography demonstrates the mix of dialectal features. [citation needed] At some point during the Old French period, vowels with a following nasal consonant began to be nasalized. While the process of losing the final nasal consonant took place after the Old French period, the nasal ...
Vowels of Parisian French, from Collins & Mees (2013:225–226). Some speakers merge /œ̃/ with /ɛ̃/ (especially in the northern half of France) and /a/ with /ɑ/. In the latter case, the outcome is an open central between the two (not shown on the chart). Standard French contrasts up to 13 oral vowels and up to 4 nasal vowels.
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of French on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of French in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
Many errors are caused by homonyms, for example French contains hundreds of words ending with IPA [εn] written diversely as -ène, -en, -enne, -aine. [ 1 ] 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 ...
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).
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French liaison and enchainement are essentially the same external sandhi process, where liaison represents the fixed, grammaticalized remnants of the phenomenon before the fall of final consonants, and enchainement is the regular, modern-day continuation of the phenomenon, operating after the fall of former final consonants. [5]