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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.
The velar nasal /ŋ/ is not a native phoneme of French, but it occurs in loan words such as camping, smoking or kung-fu. [7] Some speakers who have difficulty with this consonant realise it as a sequence [ŋɡ] or replace it with /ɲ/. [8] It could be considered a separate phoneme in Meridional French, e.g. pain /pɛŋ/ ('bread') vs. penne ...
For a guide to adding IPA characters to Wikipedia articles, see Template:IPA and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation § Entering IPA characters. French has no word-level stress so stress marks should not be used in transcribing French words. See French phonology and French orthography for a more thorough look at the sounds of French.
In English orthography, the pronunciation of hard g is /ɡ/ and that of soft g is /dʒ/; the French soft g , /ʒ/, survives in a number of French loanwords (e.g. regime, genre), [ʒ] also sometimes occurs as an allophone of [dʒ] in some accents in certain words.
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 from the menu rather than a fixed-price meal.
The Gaulish language, and presumably its many dialects and closely allied sister languages, left a few hundred words in French and many more in nearby Romance languages, i.e. Franco-Provençal (Eastern France and Western Switzerland), Occitan (Southern France), Catalan, Romansch, Gallo-Italic (Northern Italy), and many of the regional languages of northern France and Belgium collectively known ...
Square brackets are used with phonetic notation, whether broad or narrow [17] – that is, for actual pronunciation, possibly including details of the pronunciation that may not be used for distinguishing words in the language being transcribed, but which the author nonetheless wishes to document. Such phonetic notation is the primary function ...
- the French a phoneme's closest equivalent in English (different to [æ]) is the [a] found in British English; however most of the time is only found in a minority of words (often before b,d,g, such as the second a in 'grandad', handbag' etc.) ; words like trap use the ordinary æ and so aren't a good example of equivalent