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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.
Changes affecting consonants were also quite pervasive in Old French. Old French shared with the rest of the Vulgar Latin world the loss of final -M . Old French also dropped many internal consonants when they followed the strongly stressed syllable; Latin petram > Proto-Romance */ˈpɛðra/ > OF pierre; cf. Spanish piedra ("stone").
However, the ending causes "mute" final sounds to be pronounced, whereby masculine-feminine pairs become distinguishable in pronunciation if the masculine form ends in a mute consonant, which is the case with a great deal of adjectives (cf. lourd [luʁ] > lourde [luʁd] 'heavy').
The Old French pronunciations are likely derived from simplification of labial-affricate sequences [99] such as [pt͡ʃ bd͡ʒ md͡ʒ] [100] or [vd͡ʒ]. [97] These may have developed from palatalized labial consonants by means of offglide consonantization (as in Balkan Romance); [97] e.g. [pʲ] > [pt͡ʃ] > [t͡ʃ].
French verbs have a large number of simple (one-word) forms. These are composed of two distinct parts: the stem (or root, or radix), which indicates which verb it is, and the ending (inflection), which indicates the verb's tense (imperfect, present, future etc.) and mood and its subject's person (I, you, he/she etc.) and number, though many endings can correspond to multiple tense-mood-subject ...
Silent final consonants may be pronounced, in some syntactic contexts, when the following word begins with a vowel or non-aspirated h.It is important to note that many words with silent final consonants have utterly lost them, e.g. neither the 'n' in million nor the 't' in art is ever pronounced.
For a guide to adding IPA characters to Wikipedia articles, see Template:IPA and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation § Entering IPA characters. French has no word-level stress so stress marks should not be used in transcribing French words. See French phonology and French orthography for a more thorough look at the sounds of French.
That often produced a radical difference between a word's spelling and pronunciation. [6] Nevertheless, Middle French spelling was overall fairly close to the pronunciation; unlike Modern French, word-final consonants were still pronounced though they were optionally lost when they preceded another consonant that started the next word.