Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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:
Sudre outlined a way of transcribing the phonetics of French (and thus many other languages) into Solresol, primarily used for proper nouns. [ 1 ] : 32 Using common pronunciations as given by the likes of Wiktionary , it is possible to reconstruct a table of sounds using the modern IPA.
All contain graphemes that represent phonetic (sound-based) elements as well. These phonetic elements may be used on their own (to represent, for example, grammatical inflections or foreign words), or may serve as phonetic complements to a logogram (used to specify the sound of a logogram that might otherwise represent more than one word). In ...
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.
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.
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 process is the movement of final consonants across word boundaries to initial position in vowel-initial words so as to better conform to the French language's preference for open syllables (over 70%) [dubious – discuss], i.e., V, CV, or CCV, especially where two vowels might otherwise link together (vowel hiatus).
The following is the chart of the International Phonetic Alphabet, a standardized system of phonetic symbols devised and maintained by the International Phonetic Association. It is not a complete list of all possible speech sounds in the world's languages, only those about which stand-alone articles exist in this encyclopedia.