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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:
Examples: cēra > OF cire, pagēnsem > OF païs, placēre > OF plaisir, [40] iacēre > OF gesir [aː], when not followed by a nasal or preceded by a palatal sound, becomes a vowel that can be transcribed as /æ/. [42] Its actual phonetic quality is debated: in Early Old French, it is usually written e but does not assonate with either /ɛ/ or /e/.
In French, the outcomes of /dj ɡj/ appear consistent with an early merger into [j] in all positions followed by fortition of [j] word-initially or after /r/, yielding modern French [ʒ]. Examples include DIURNUM > jour [ʒuʀ] and HORDEUM > orge [ɔʀʒ]. [43] (Note however that this is different from the usual outcome of original /rj/ in French.)
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.
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.
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 ...
And it is *not* taught (maybe it is to foreigners whose French teacher uses a 19th century dictionary with ancient phonetics, but nobody knows about that sound in France for standard French). It is incorrect to say that "many French vowels can be long", as it is only the case for /ɑ:/ -- which is, as the note says, often replaced by /a/.
For example, Portuguese amei "I loved" is composed of am-"love" and the fusional suffix -ei "first-person singular preterite indicative". Romance languages have a primarily subject–verb–object word order, with varying degrees of flexibility from one language to another. Constructions are predominantly of the head-first (right-branching) type.