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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.
There are two underlying tonemes, L (low) and H (high); phonetically, L, H, mid, HL, and LH are all found. Metathesis is an extremely common and regular grammatical phenomenon in Fur: when a consonant pronoun prefix is prefixed to a verb that begins with a consonant, either the verb's first consonant is deleted or it changes places with the following vowel; e.g.:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Usage of collective nouns Notes Further reading External links Generic terms The terms in this table apply to many ...
French has three articles: definite, indefinite, and partitive. The difference between the definite and indefinite articles is similar to that in English (definite: the; indefinite: a, an), except that the indefinite article has a plural form (similar to some, though English normally does not use an article before indefinite plural nouns). The ...
For plural words, the siglum is often doubled: F. = frater and FF. = fratres. Tripled sigla often stand for three: DDD = domini tres . Letters lying on their sides, or mirrored (backwards), often indicate female titles, but a mirrored C (Ↄ) stands generally for con or contra (the latter sometimes with a macron above: Ↄ̄).
Diminutives are more frequently used than in English. Some words only exist in the diminutive form, e.g. "Kaninchen" ("rabbit") derived from Old French word conin, which in turn is from the Latin diminutive cuniculus. The use of diminutives is quite different between the dialects. The Alemannic dialects for example use the diminutive very often.
From a cross-project redirect: This is a redirect from a title linked to an item on Wikidata.The Wikidata item linked to this page is French alphabet (Q755124).. Use this template only on hard redirects – for soft redirects use {{Soft redirect with Wikidata item}}.
The charts below show the way in which the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents French language pronunciations in Wikipedia articles. For a guide to adding IPA characters to Wikipedia articles, see Template:IPA and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation § Entering IPA characters.