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The languages are classified under primary language families, which may be hypothesized, marked in italics, but do not include ones discredited by mainstream scholars (e.g. Niger–Congo but not Altaic). [1] Dark-shaded cells indicate extinct languages. The parenthesized righthand side of expressions indicates marginal phonemes.
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:
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.
There are many views as to exactly what phonemes are and how a given language should be analyzed in phonemic terms. Generally, a phoneme is regarded as an abstraction of a set (or equivalence class) of spoken sound variations that are nevertheless perceived as a single basic unit of sound by the ordinary native speakers of a given language.
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. [1] All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously ...
In 1886, a group of French and English language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, formed what would be known from 1897 onwards as the International Phonetic Association (in French, l'Association phonétique internationale). [6] The idea of the alphabet had been suggested to Passy by Otto Jespersen.
The phonemes /i/ and /iː/ are not distinct in modern French of France or in modern Quebec French; the spelling <î> was the /iː/ phoneme, but il and île are pronounced with a short /i/ in modern French of France and in modern Quebec French. In modern Quebec French, the /iː/ phoneme is used only in loanwords: cheap.
CMUdict can be used as a training corpus for building statistical grapheme-to-phoneme (g2p) models [1] that will generate pronunciations for words not yet included in the dictionary. The most recent release is 0.7b; it contains over 134,000 entries. An interactive lookup version is available. [2]