Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
bien entendu well understood, well known, obvious – "of course" bien pensant lit. "well thinking"; right thinking, orthodox. Formerly implied willful blindness to dangers or suffering faced by others but, nowadays corresponds to "politically correct". The noun form bien-pensance is rarely seen in English. billet-doux lit. "sweet note", love ...
There are various lexical differences between Quebec French and Metropolitan French in France. These are distributed throughout the registers, from slang to formal usage. Notwithstanding Acadian French in the Maritime Provinces , Quebec French is the dominant form of French throughout Canada, with only very limited interregional variations.
By the end of the 18th century, schools in France were beginning to publish bulletins with student evaluations and class rankings and the Jesuite College at Caen would develop a numerical 4 point ranking ("4 niveaux: 1 = bien; 2 = assez bien; 3 = médiocre; 0 = mal"). [17]
A mark between 14 and 15.99 will earn a mention bien (high honours, lit. "good"); A mark between 16 and 17.99 will earn a mention très bien (very high honours, lit. "very good"); A mark of 18 and above will earn the félicitations du jury (highest honors, lit. “congratulations from the [examination] jury”).
Get AOL Mail for FREE! Manage your email like never before with travel, photo & document views. Personalize your inbox with themes & tabs. You've Got Mail!
These sacres are commonly given in a phonetic spelling to indicate the differences in pronunciation from the original word, several of which (notably, the deletion of final consonants and change of [ɛ] to [a] before /ʁ/) are typical of informal Quebec French. The nouns here can also be modified for use as verbs (see "Non-profane uses", below).
Le Bon Usage (French pronunciation: [lə bɔn‿yzaʒ], Good Usage), informally called Le Grevisse, is a descriptive book about French grammar first published in 1936 by Maurice Grevisse, and periodically revised since. It describes the usage of the French language, primarily in its written literary form.
Acadian French has maintained phonemic distinctions between /a/ and /ɑ/, /ɛ/ and /ɛː/, /ø/ and /ə/, /ɛ̃/ and /œ̃/. In informal speech, the /ɑ/ vowel is realized as [ɔ]: pas ('step') /pɑ/ → [pɔ] and bras (arm) /bʁɑ/ → [bʁɔ], etc. The short /ɛ/ is realized as [ɛ] and it is the same as Parisian French.