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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.
The word hysteria originates from the Greek word for uterus, hystera. The oldest record of hysteria dates back to 1900 BCE when Egyptians recorded behavioral abnormalities in adult women on the Kahun Papyrus. [7] The Egyptians attributed the behavioral disturbances to a wandering uterus – thus the condition later being dubbed hysteria.
Misspellings in French are a subset of errors in French orthography. Many errors are caused by homonyms; for example, French contains hundreds of words ending with IPA [εn] written as -ène, -en, -enne or -aine. [1] Many French words end with silent consonants, lettres muettes, creating, in effect, homonyms.
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).
French grammar is the set of rules by which the French language creates statements, questions and commands. In many respects, it is quite similar to that of the other Romance languages . French is a moderately inflected language.
Note that the word in French has retained the general meaning: e.g. château in French means "castle" and chef means "chief". In fact, loanwords from French generally have a more restricted or specialised meaning than in the original language, e.g. legume (in Fr. légume means "vegetable"), gateau (in Fr. gâteau means "cake").
Examples: cēra > OF cire, pagēnsem > OF païs, placēre > OF plaisir, [40] iacēre > OF gesir [aː], when not followed by a nasal or preceded by a palatal sound, becomes a vowel that can be transcribed as /æ/. [42] Its actual phonetic quality is debated: in Early Old French, it is usually written e but does not assonate with either /ɛ/ or /e/.
Many words in French can be analyzed as having a "latent" final consonant that is pronounced only in certain syntactic contexts when the next word begins with a vowel. For example, the word deux /dø/ ('two') is pronounced [dø] in isolation or before a consonant-initial word (deux jours /dø ʒuʁ/ → [dø.ʒuʁ] 'two days'), but in deux ans ...