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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 borrowing of connoisseur into English predates this change; the modern French spelling is connaisseur. étois → étais (was) The spelling of some plural words whose singular form ended in D and T was modified to reinsert this mute consonant, so as to bring the plural in morphological alignment with the singular.
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:
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.
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 ...
There are a few words that English has recently borrowed from contemporary French. The pronunciation of these English words is generally an approximation to that of the French word (the French use or in terms of the International Phonetic Alphabet). English-speakers use a variety of substitutions for these sounds.