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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.
French phonology is the sound system of French.This article discusses mainly the phonology of all the varieties of Standard French.Notable phonological features include the uvular r present in some accents, nasal vowels, and three processes affecting word-final sounds:
The doublet of français and François in modern French orthography demonstrates the mix of dialectal features. [citation needed] At some point during the Old French period, vowels with a following nasal consonant began to be nasalized. While the process of losing the final nasal consonant took place after the Old French period, the nasal ...
Misspellings in French are a subset of errors in French orthography. Many errors are caused by homonyms; for example, French contains hundreds of words ending with IPA [εn] written as -ène, -en, -enne or -aine. [1] Many French words end with silent consonants, lettres muettes, creating, in effect, homonyms.
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of French on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of French in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
The circumflex first appeared in written French in the 16th century. It was borrowed from Ancient Greek, and combines the acute accent and the grave accent.Grammarian Jacques Dubois (known as Sylvius) is the first writer known to have used the Greek symbol in his writing (although he wrote in Latin).
Spelling and punctuation before the 16th century was highly erratic, but the introduction of printing in 1470 provoked the need for uniformity.. Several Renaissance humanists (working with publishers) proposed reforms in French orthography, the most famous being Jacques Peletier du Mans who developed a phonemic-based spelling system and introduced new typographic signs (1550).
In modern Quebec French, the /iː/ phoneme is used only in loanwords: cheap. The phonemes /y/ and /yː/ are not distinct in modern French of France or in modern Quebec French; the spelling <û> was the /yː/ phoneme, but flûte is pronounced with a short /y/ in modern French of France and in modern Quebec French.