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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.
Generally when plus is used to mean more, the final s is pronounced (), whereas it is never pronounced when used to mean 'not anymore' (). As an example, the informal sentence Il y en a plus could be pronounced with the final [s] ( [il i ɑ̃n a plys, jɑ̃n a plys] ) to mean "there is more", or it could be pronounced without it ( [il i ɑ̃n a ...
French is an administrative language and is commonly but unofficially used in the Maghreb states, Mauritania, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.As of 2023, an estimated 350 million African people spread across 34 African countries can speak French either as a first or second language, mostly as a secondary language, making Africa the continent with the most French speakers in the world. [2]
The complex but regular French sound changes have caused irregularities in the conjugation of Old French verbs, like stressed stems caused by historic diphthongization (amer, aim, aimes, aime, aiment, but amons, amez), or regular loss of certain phonemes (vivre, vif, vis, vit). Later in Modern French, these changes were limited to fewer ...
Old French (franceis, françois, romanz; French: ancien français) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France approximately between the late 8th [2] and mid-14th centuries. Rather than a unified language , Old French was a group of Romance dialects , mutually intelligible yet diverse .
French has a complex system of personal pronouns (analogous to English I, we, they, and so on). When compared to English, the particularities of French personal pronouns include: a T-V distinction in the second person singular (familiar tu vs. polite vous) the placement of object pronouns before the verb: « Agnès les voit. » ("Agnès sees ...
Velars /k/ and /ɡ/ may become palatalised to [kʲ⁓c] and [ɡʲ⁓ɟ] before /i, e, ɛ/, and more variably before /a/. [11] Word-final /k/ may also be palatalised to [kʲ]. [12] Velar palatalisation has traditionally been associated with the working class, [13] though recent studies suggest it is spreading to more demographics of large French ...
Middle French (French: moyen français) is a historical division of the French language that covers the period from the mid-14th to the early 17th centuries. [ 3 ] [ 4 ] It is a period of transition during which: