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The prepositions à (' to, at ') and de (' of, from ') form contracted forms with the masculine and plural articles le and les: au, du, aux, and des, respectively.. Like the, the French definite article is used with a noun referring to a specific item when both the speaker and the audience know what the item is.
"in place (of)"; partially translated from the existing French phrase au lieu (de). léger de main (legerdemain) "light of hand": sleight of hand, usually in the context of deception or the art of stage magic tricks. Meaningless in French; the equivalent is un tour de passe-passe. maître d' translates literally as master o'.
French English [15] Une belle à la taille svelte se promène sous les arbres de la forêt, en se reposant de temps en temps. Ayant relevé de la main les trois voiles d'or qui lui couvrent les seins, elle renvoie à la lune les rayons dont elle était baignée. A beautiful woman, with a slim waist, walks beneath the forest trees,
What the French call complément d'objet indirect is a complement introduced by an essentially void à or de (at least in the case of a noun) required by some particular, otherwise intransitive, verbs: e.g. Les cambrioleurs ont profité de mon absence 'the robbers took advantage of my absence' — but the essentially synonymous les cambrioleurs ...
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).
The distinction between long and short vowels is also upheld, which can create minimal pairs in the presence of a mute ending consonant: e.g. "bot" (as in un pied bot, a club foot) and "beau" (beautiful) are not homonyms in Belgian French, creating minimal pairs of sentences like J'ai vu son pied gauche, il était bot (~ I saw she was club ...
Most of the texts are French translations of earlier texts. Jean de Long served as the primary translator. Earlier editions of Marco Polo's Description of the World date as early as 1298. [2] John Mandeville's text dates to as early as c.1356-7. [2] The texts describe a variety of cross-cultural interactions in the medieval world.
By the end of the 19th century, French-language newspapers abounded in New England, and in their pages works of fiction were published in installments as serial novels.The term feuilleton, though more broadly used to describe a woman's section or supplementary column in French-language newspapers with non-political news, became synonymous with this type of fiction in the context Franco ...