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a close relationship or connection; an affair. The French meaning is broader; liaison also means "bond"' such as in une liaison chimique (a chemical bond) lingerie a type of female underwear. littérateur an intellectual (can be pejorative in French, meaning someone who writes a lot but does not have a particular skill). [35] louche
French verbs have a large number of simple (one-word) forms. These are composed of two distinct parts: the stem (or root, or radix), which indicates which verb it is, and the ending (inflection), which indicates the verb's tense (imperfect, present, future etc.) and mood and its subject's person (I, you, he/she etc.) and number, though many endings can correspond to multiple tense-mood-subject ...
abaissement - fall/lowering; abaisser - to lower; abandonner - to abandon; abandonné - abandoned/deserted; abasourdi - stunned; abattage - slaughter; abattant - toilet lid
Many French words end with silent consonants, lettres muettes, creating, in effect, homonyms. The following verb endings are all pronounced the same: tu parles, il parle and ils parlent; there can also be confusion around the similar sounding je parlais and je parlai. [2]
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 usually expresses negation in two parts, with the particle ne attached to the verb, and one or more negative words (connegatives) that modify the verb or one of its arguments. Negation encircles a conjugated verb with ne after the subject and the connegative after the verb, if the verb is finite or a gerund .
The sound noted -s and -x was a hard [s], which did not remain in French after the twelfth century (it can be found in words like (tu) chantes or doux), but which was protected from complete elision when the following word began with a vowel (which effectively means, when it was found between two vowels).
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.