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French adjectives therefore have four forms: masculine singular, feminine singular, masculine plural, and feminine plural. 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 ...
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. It is necessary in the following ...
French has a T-V distinction in the second person singular. That is, it uses two different sets of pronouns: tu and vous and their various forms. The usage of tu and vous depends on the kind of relationship (formal or informal) that exists between the speaker and the person with whom they are speaking and the age differences between these subjects. [1]
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 ...
It may be that some nouns are not marked for plural at all, like sheep and series in English. In languages which also have a case system, such as Latin and Russian, nouns can have not just one plural form but several, corresponding to the various cases. The inflection might affect multiple words, not just the noun; the noun itself need not ...
The first person plural form and pronoun (nous) are now usually replaced by the pronoun on (literally: "one") and a third person singular verb form in Modern French. Thus, nous travaillons (formal) becomes on travaille. In most verbs from the other conjugations, each person in the plural can be distinguished among themselves and from the ...
‑eaux is the standard French language plural form of nouns ending in ‑eau, e.g. eau → eaux, château → châteaux, gâteau → gâteaux. In the United States, it often occurs as the ending of Cajun surnames, as well as a replacement for the long "O" (/ oʊ /) sound in some English words as a marker of Cajun, or more broadly Louisiana ...
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.