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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.
Many words in the English vocabulary are of French origin, most coming from the Anglo-Norman spoken by the upper classes in England for several hundred years after the Norman Conquest, before the language settled into what became Modern English. English words of French origin, such as art, competition, force, money, and table are pronounced ...
Further problems are caused by examples of confusion with English, such as connection (incorrect) and connexion (correct). [3] Misspellings of French words outside the French language occur often and account for part of the etymology of some modern loanwords in English, such as English "caddie". [4]
English words of French origin should be distinguished from French words and expressions in English. Although French is mostly derived from Latin, important other word sources are Gaulish and some Germanic languages, especially Old Frankish. Since English is of Germanic origin, words that have entered English from French borrowings of Germanic ...
Other closely related languages, however, have less interrelated ways of forming wh-questions with separate lexemes for each of these wh-pronouns. This includes Wardaman , which has a collection of entirely unrelated interrogative stems: yinggiya 'who', ngamanda 'what', guda 'where', nyangurlang 'when', gun.garr-ma 'how many/what kind'.
I stumbled across Lists of English words of international origin yesterday; there's an as yet unused entry for French - List of English words of French origin. I thought people who worked on this article might like to work on this list - it's probably the place where many of the "French" words which haven't made the cut for this article (hors d ...
Generally, words coming from French often retain a higher register than words of Old English origin, and they are considered by some to be more posh, elaborate, sophisticated, or pretentious. However, there are exceptions: weep , groom and stone (from Old English) occupy a slightly higher register than cry , brush and rock (from French).
Some English words borrowed from French may begin with the letter h but not with the sound /h/. Examples include heir, and, in many regional pronunciations, hour, hono(u)r and honest. In some cases, spelling pronunciation has introduced the sound /h/ into such words, as in humble, human, hotel and (for most speakers) historic.