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"in place (of)"; partially translated from the existing French phrase au lieu (de). léger de main (legerdemain) "light of hand": sleight of hand, usually in the context of deception or the art of stage magic tricks. Meaningless in French; the equivalent is un tour de passe-passe. maître d' translates literally as master o'.
The prepositions à (' to, at ') and de (' of, from ') form contracted forms with the masculine and plural articles le and les: au, du, aux, and des, respectively.. Like the, the French definite article is used with a noun referring to a specific item when both the speaker and the audience know what the item is.
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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 ...
A few adjectives have a fifth form, viz. an additional masculine singular form for use in liaison before a noun beginning with a vowel or a "mute h", e.g. un beau jardin, un bel homme, une belle femme, de beaux enfants, de belles maisons (a beautiful garden, a handsome man, a beautiful woman, beautiful children, beautiful houses).
The third volume, Grammaire pour tous (Grammar for All) is a guide on French syntax, sentence structure, the application of proper grammar to sentences, and punctuation. Bescherelles (L'art de conjuguer in particular) are commonly used in French immersion schools, and it is often required for students to purchase one for class.
Français fondamental (French for 'Fundamental French') is a list of words and grammatical concepts, devised in the beginning of the 1950s for teaching foreigners and residents of the French Union, France's colonial empire. A series of investigations in the 1950s and 1960s showed that a small number of words are used the same way orally and 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.