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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.
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]
The process is the movement of final consonants across word boundaries to initial position in vowel-initial words so as to better conform to the French language's preference for open syllables (over 70%) [dubious – discuss], i.e., V, CV, or CCV, especially where two vowels might otherwise link together (vowel hiatus).
An example of historical elision in French that began at the phrasal level and became lexicalized is preposition de > d' in aujourd'hui "today", now felt by native speakers to be one word, but deriving from au jour de hui, literally "at the day of today" and meaning "nowadays", although hui is no longer recognized as meaningful in French. In ...
A masculine ending and feminine ending or weak ending are terms used in prosody, the study of verse form. In general, "masculine ending" refers to a line ending in a stressed syllable; "feminine ending" is its opposite, describing a line ending in a stressless syllable. The terms originate from a grammatical pattern of the French language.
French uses the capital É, because the use of a capital letter alters the meaning of the word (État: a State, as in a country; état: a state of being). It also cannot be shortened as coup as is often the case in English- because this literally means a "hit" in French, but can be used figuratively to mean many more things.
In phonology, epenthesis (/ ɪ ˈ p ɛ n θ ə s ɪ s, ɛ-/; Greek ἐπένθεσις) means the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially in the first syllable , the last syllable , or between two syllabic sounds in a word. The opposite process in which one or more sounds are removed is referred to as elision. [1]
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.