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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.
Word stress is not distinctive in French, so two words cannot be distinguished based on stress placement alone. Grammatical stress is always on the final full syllable (syllable with a vowel other than schwa) of a word. Monosyllables with schwa as their only vowel (ce, de, que, etc.) are generally clitics but otherwise may receive stress. [38]
Help:IPA/French. Help. : IPA/French. This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of French on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of French in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them. Integrity must be maintained between the key and the transcriptions ...
t. e. French exhibits perhaps the most extensive phonetic changes (from Latin) of any of the Romance languages. Similar changes are seen in some of the northern Italian regional languages, such as Lombard or Ligurian. Most other Romance languages are significantly more conservative phonetically, with Spanish, Italian, and especially Sardinian ...
cachet. lit. "stamp"; a distinctive quality; quality, prestige. café. a coffee shop (also used in French for "coffee"). Café au lait. café au lait. coffee with milk; or a light-brown color. In medicine, it is also used to describe a birthmark that is of a light-brown color (café au lait spot). calque.
French (français [fʁɑ̃sɛ] ⓘ or langue française [lɑ̃ɡ fʁɑ̃sɛːz] ⓘ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. It descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, as did all Romance languages. French evolved from Gallo-Romance, the Latin spoken in Gaul, and more specifically in Northern Gaul. Its closest relatives ...
The phonemes /u/ and /uː/ are not distinct in modern French of France or in modern Quebec French; the spelling <oû> was the /uː/ phoneme, but croûte is pronounced with a short /u/ in modern French of France and in modern Quebec French. In Quebec French, the phoneme /uː/ is used only in loanwords: cool. The phoneme /ɔ/ is pronounced [ɒː ...
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.