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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.
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.
For example, take the word "croissant". I think most English speakers who hear this word would think only of the bun. (Even here in Canada, where we learn French in school, I think most people my age — or even older — don't realize that the word "croissant" comes from the French word for "crescent".
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/.
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".
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.
This category is not for articles about concepts and things but only for articles about the words themselves.As such almost all article titles should be italicized (with Template:Italic title).
English words of French origin can also be distinguished from French words and expressions used by English speakers. Although French is derived mainly from Latin, which accounts for about 60% of English vocabulary either directly or via a Romance language, it includes words from Gaulish and Germanic languages, especially Old Frankish. Since ...