Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 also shows enormous phonetic changes between the Old French period and the modern language. Spelling, however, has barely changed, which accounts for the wide differences between current spelling and pronunciation. Some of the most profound changes have been: The loss of almost all final consonants.
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).
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 ...
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".
Cheyenne (from the French pronunciation and spelling of the Dakota word Sahi'yena, a diminutive of Sahi'ya, a Dakotan name for the Cree people. [134]) Cheyenne River; Dubois (named after U.S. Senator Fred Dubois, of French-Canadian ancestry) Fontenelle; Fort Laramie; Fremont County (named for John C. Frémont, French-American pioneer and ...
French is a Romance language (meaning that it is descended primarily from Vulgar Latin) that specifically is classified under the Gallo-Romance languages.. The discussion of the history of a language is typically divided into "external history", describing the ethnic, political, social, technological, and other changes that affected the languages, and "internal history", describing the ...
crouton, from the diminutive form of the old French word croust, (later to come into modern French as the word croûte), meaning 'crust'. crown , Anglo-Fr. coroune , from Old Fr. corone , compare Mod. Fr. couronne