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List of languages Language Language family Phonemes Notes Ref Total Consonants Vowels, [clarification needed] tones and stress Arabic (Standard) Afroasiatic: 34: 28 6 Number of phonemes in Modern Standard Arabic, without counting the long vowels /eː/ and /oː/ which are phonemic in Mashriqi dialects or other dialectal phonemes.
The velar nasal /ŋ/ is not a native phoneme of French, but it occurs in loan words such as camping, smoking or kung-fu. [7] Some speakers who have difficulty with this consonant realise it as a sequence [ŋɡ] or replace it with /ɲ/. [8] It could be considered a separate phoneme in Meridional French, e.g. pain /pɛŋ/ ('bread') vs. penne ...
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.
In French, /wa/, /wɛ̃/, /ɥi/ and /ɥɛ̃/ may be considered true diphthongs (that is, fully contained in the syllable nucleus: [u̯a], [u̯ɛ̃], [y̯i], [y̯ɛ̃]). Other sequences are considered part of a glide formation process that turns a high vowel into a semivowel (and part of the syllable onset) when followed by another vowel.
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.
Moreover, in many other words, the pronunciation has subsequently evolved from a fixed spelling, so that it has to be said that the phonemes represent the graphemes rather than vice versa. And in much technical jargon, the primary medium of communication is the written language rather than the spoken language, so the phonemes represent the ...
That is, a trisyllabic word in a three-tone syllable-tone language has many more tonal possibilities (3 × 3 × 3 = 27) than a monosyllabic word (3), but there is no such difference in a word-tone language. For example, Shanghainese has two contrastive (phonemic) tones no matter how many syllables are in a word.
The complex but regular French sound changes have caused irregularities in the conjugation of Old French verbs, like stressed stems caused by historic diphthongization (amer, aim, aimes, aime, aiment, but amons, amez), or regular loss of certain phonemes (vivre, vif, vis, vit). Later in Modern French, these changes were limited to fewer ...