Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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:
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.
French also shows enormous phonetic changes between the Old French period and the modern language. Spelling, however, has barely changed, which accounts for the wide differences between current spelling and pronunciation. Some of the most profound changes have been: The loss of almost all final consonants.
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).
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.
The concept of the phonetic word is important because quality, intensity and duration of vowels in unstressed syllables (vowel reduction) depend on their location in relation to this stressed syllable. [6] The concept of phonetic word should not be confused with loss of stress in rhythmic speech, e.g., in poetry, in trisyllabic metrical feet:
The claim of no word-level stress is contradicted in the French phonology article that the Help links to, where it's made clear that word-level stress exists, and the position is described (albeit, alas, not immediately exemplified): "grammatical stress is always on the final full syllable (syllable with a vowel other than schwa) of a word."
It is phonetically [wɑː] in formal speech, but it can also be pronounced in some additional different ways ([waɪ̯, wɛɪ̯, wei̯, wɛː, wɔː, wɒː]) in joual (boîte 'box' [bwaɪ̯t] ⓘ). Also, there are many words which are pronounced with the long /wɑ/ even though there is no circumflex: coiffe, croissant, soirée and poivre, etc.