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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 its uvular r , nasal vowels , and three processes affecting word-final sounds:
à la short for (ellipsis of) à la manière de; in the manner of/in the style of [1]à la carte lit. "on the card, i.e. menu"; In restaurants it refers to ordering individual dishes "à la carte" rather than a fixed-price meal "menu".
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 sound developed variously in different varieties of Oïl: most of the surviving languages maintain a pronunciation as /we/, but Literary French adopted a dialectal pronunciation, /wa/. The doublet of français and François in modern French orthography demonstrates the mix of dialectal features.
The word cadre is sometimes pronounced / ˈ k ɑː d r eɪ / in English, as though it were of Spanish origin. In French, the final e is silent and a common English pronunciation is / ˈ k ɑː d r ə /. [8] Legal English is replete with words derived from Norman French, which for a long time was the language of the courts in England and Wales ...
More recent borrowings are often distinguished by maintaining the French spelling and pronunciation, e.g. chef (vs. chief), pâté (vs. paste), fête (vs. feast). There are multiple doublets caused by the w → g and ca → cha sound changes, which happened in standard French but not
French: miam, crounche miam miam glouglouglou gloups German: mampf mampf mampf, hamm hamm, mjam schlürf, gluck schluck Gujarati: gudgud Hebrew: אָממ אָממ (amm amm) שלוּק (shluk) צחצוח (tsikhtsúakh), שקשוק (shikshúk refers to "shaking teeth") Hungarian: hamm nyam-nyam, csám-csám glu-glu, glugy-glugy sika-sika ...
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).