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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.
à la short for (ellipsis of) à la manière de; in the manner of/in the style of [1]à la carte lit. "on the card, i.e. menu"; In restaurants it refers to ordering individual dishes "à la carte" rather than a fixed-price meal "menu".
The word hysteria originates from the Greek word for uterus, hystera. The oldest record of hysteria dates back to 1900 BCE when Egyptians recorded behavioral abnormalities in adult women on the Kahun Papyrus. [7] The Egyptians attributed the behavioral disturbances to a wandering uterus – thus the condition later being dubbed hysteria.
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).
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.
Examples: cēra > OF cire, pagēnsem > OF païs, placēre > OF plaisir, [40] iacēre > OF gesir [aː], when not followed by a nasal or preceded by a palatal sound, becomes a vowel that can be transcribed as /æ/. [42] Its actual phonetic quality is debated: in Early Old French, it is usually written e but does not assonate with either /ɛ/ or /e/.
For example, Spanish allows for all six possible word orders, compared to French’s three. Additionally, unlike other Romance languages, specifically Spanish and Italian , French does not have free inversion , which is often explained by French not being a pro-drop language (while Spanish and Italian are).
English words of French origin can also be distinguished from French words and expressions used by English speakers. Although French is derived mainly from Latin, which accounts for about 60% of English vocabulary either directly or via a Romance language, it includes words from Gaulish and Germanic languages, especially Old Frankish. Since ...