Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
first public performance of an entertainment personality or group. In French, it means "beginning." The English meaning of the word exists only when in the plural form: [faire] ses débuts [sur scène] (to make one's débuts on the stage). The English meaning and usage also extends to sports to denote a player who is making their first ...
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.
The grave accent marks the height or openness of the vowels e and o, indicating that they are pronounced open: è [ɛ] (as opposed to é [e]); ò [ɔ] (as opposed to ó [o]), in several Romance languages: Catalan uses the accent on three letters (a, e, and o). French orthography uses the accent on three letters (a, e, and u).
Certain words, like piñata, jalapeño and quinceañera, are usually kept intact. In many instances the ñ is replaced with the plain letter n. In words of German origin (e.g. doppelgänger), the letters with umlauts ä, ö, ü may be written ae, oe, ue. [13] This could be seen in many newspapers during World War II, which printed Fuehrer for ...
sur ~ sûr(e)(s) (from seür → sëur): The homography with the adjective sur(e), "sour", justifies maintaining the accent in the feminine and plural. The accent is also maintained in derived words such as sûreté. du ~ dû (from deü): As the homography disappears in the inflected forms of the past participle, we have dû but dus / due(s).
Most of these words are written with a leading h (haricot, héros, haleter) which is not pronounced itself, but a few begin with a vowel or glide (onze, oui, yaourt). Note that some words beginning in h do experience liaison (e.g. homme in tout homme). Such words are said to begin with a mute h or h muet.
—Académie, 1740, using accents for the first time. The third (1740) and fourth (1762) editions of the Académie dictionary were very progressive, changing the spelling of about half the words altogether. Accents, which had been in common use by printers for a long time, were finally adopted by the Académie, and many mute consonants were ...
It excludes combinations of words of French origin with words whose origin is a language other than French — e.g., ice cream, sunray, jellyfish, killjoy, lifeguard, and passageway— and English-made combinations of words of French origin — e.g., grapefruit (grape + fruit), layperson (lay + person), mailorder, magpie, marketplace, surrender ...