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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.
Some sources distinguish "diacritical marks" (marks upon standard letters in the A–Z 26-letter alphabet) from "special characters" (letters not marked but radically modified from the standard 26-letter alphabet) such as Old English and Icelandic eth (Ð, ð) and thorn (uppercase Þ, lowercase þ), and ligatures such as Latin and Anglo-Saxon Æ (minuscule: æ), and German eszett (ß; final ...
For example, French and Portuguese treat letters with diacritical marks the same as the underlying letter for purposes of ordering and dictionaries. The Scandinavian languages and the Finnish language, by contrast, treat the characters with diacritics å , ä , and ö as distinct letters of the alphabet, and sort them after z .
The grave accent marks the height or openness of the vowels e and o, indicating that they are pronounced open: è [ɛ] (as opposed to é [e]); ò [ɔ] (as opposed to ó [o]), in several Romance languages: Catalan uses the accent on three letters (a, e, and o). French orthography uses the accent on three letters (a, e, and u).
Diacritical marks of two dots ¨, placed side-by-side over or under a letter, are used in several languages for several different purposes.The most familiar to English-language speakers are the diaeresis and the umlaut, though there are numerous others.
The circumflex first appeared in written French in the 16th century. It was borrowed from Ancient Greek, and combines the acute accent and the grave accent.Grammarian Jacques Dubois (known as Sylvius) is the first writer known to have used the Greek symbol in his writing (although he wrote in Latin).
A macron (/ ˈ m æ k r ɒ n, ˈ m eɪ-/ MAK-ron, MAY-) is a diacritical mark: it is a straight bar ¯ placed above a letter, usually a vowel. Its name derives from Ancient Greek μακρόν (makrón) 'long' because it was originally used to mark long or heavy syllables in Greco-Roman metrics. It now more often marks a long vowel.
"Place-names from foreign languages appear in roman; retain diacritical marks if original is from a Latin alphabet except in commonly anglicized names: Montreal, Quebec, Istanbul. If a place-name is transliterated from a non-Latin alphabet, diacritical marks are generally not used except on atlas and supplement maps.