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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.
Accented letters: â ç è é ê î ô û, rarely ë ï ; ù only in the word où, à only at the ends of a few words (including à).Never á í ì ó ò ú.; Angle quotation marks: « » (though "curly-Q" quotation marks are also used); dialogue traditionally indicated by means of dashes.
Certain words, like piñata, jalapeño and quinceañera, are usually kept intact. In many instances the ñ is replaced with the plain letter n. In words of German origin (e.g. doppelgänger), the letters with umlauts ä, ö, ü may be written ae, oe, ue. [14] This could be seen in many newspapers during World War II, which printed Fuehrer for ...
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 process is the movement of final consonants across word boundaries to initial position in vowel-initial words so as to better conform to the French language's preference for open syllables (over 70%) [dubious – discuss], i.e., V, CV, or CCV, especially where two vowels might otherwise link together (vowel hiatus).
Sylvius used the circumflex to indicate so-called "false diphthongs".Early modern French as spoken in Sylvius' time had coalesced all its true diphthongs into phonetic monophthongs; that is, a pure vowel sound, one whose articulation at both beginning and end is relatively fixed, and which does not glide up or down towards a new position of articulation.
Other letters modified by diacritics are treated as variants of the underlying letter, with the exception that ü is frequently sorted as y . Languages that treat accented letters as variants of the underlying letter usually alphabetize words with such symbols immediately after similar unmarked words.
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 ...