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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.
17th-century French literature was written throughout the Grand Siècle of France, spanning the reigns of Henry IV of France, the Regency of Marie de' Medici, Louis XIII of France, the Regency of Anne of Austria (and the civil war called the Fronde) and the reign of Louis XIV of France.
Ronde ('round' in French) is a kind of script in which the heavy strokes are nearly upright, giving the characters when taken together a round look. [1] It appeared in France at the end of the 16th century, growing out from a late local variant of Gothic cursive influenced by North Italian Renaissance types in Rotunda , a bookish round Gothic ...
The French language is a Romance language derived from Latin and heavily influenced principally by Celtic and Frankish. Beginning in the 11th century, literature written in medieval French was one of the oldest vernacular (non-Latin) literatures in western Europe and it became a key source of literary themes in the Middle Ages across the continent.
The great French playwrights of the 17th century, Molière, Racine and Corneille, continued to exert a great influence on the Comédie-Française, but new life was brought into French theater by the tragedies of Voltaire, which introduced modern themes while keeping the classical forms of the alexandrine, as in the play Zaïre in 1732, and The ...
Up to roughly 1340, the Romance languages spoken in the Middle Ages in the northern half of what is today France are collectively known as "ancien français" ("Old French") or "langues d'oïl" (languages where one says "oïl" to mean "yes"); following the Germanic invasions of France in the fifth century, these Northern dialects had developed distinctly different phonetic and syntactical ...
Writing in French by Africans was formerly classified as "colonial literature" and discussed as part of colonial studies for its ethnographical interest, rather than studied for its literary merit. Any texts in French from the colonies and territories that were considered to have merit were subsumed under the classification of French literature .
Changes affecting consonants were also quite pervasive in Old French. Old French shared with the rest of the Vulgar Latin world the loss of final -M . Old French also dropped many internal consonants when they followed the strongly stressed syllable; Latin petram > Proto-Romance */ˈpɛðra/ > OF pierre; cf. Spanish piedra ("stone").