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Old French (franceis, françois, romanz; French: ancien français) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France approximately between the late 8th [2] and the mid-14th century. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a group of Romance dialects, mutually intelligible yet diverse.
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.
French also shows enormous phonetic changes between the Old French period and the modern language. Spelling, however, has barely changed, which accounts for the wide differences between current spelling and pronunciation. Some of the most profound changes have been: The loss of almost all final consonants.
Spelling and punctuation before the 16th century was highly erratic, but the introduction of printing in 1470 provoked the need for uniformity.. Several Renaissance humanists (working with publishers) proposed reforms in French orthography, the most famous being Jacques Peletier du Mans who developed a phonemic-based spelling system and introduced new typographic signs (1550).
French spelling, like English spelling, tends to preserve obsolete pronunciation rules. This is mainly due to extreme phonetic changes since the Old French period, without a corresponding change in spelling. Moreover, some conscious changes were made to restore Latin orthography (as with some English words such as "debt"):
Other Old French words have even disappeared from Modern French: dandelion. On the other hand, a move to restore the classical roots, Latin or Ancient Greek, occurred in the 16th and 17th centuries. Thus words from Old French saw their spelling re-Latinized.
Middle French (French: moyen français) is a historical division of the French language that covers the period from the mid-14th to the early 17th century. [1][2] It is a period of transition during which: the literary development of French prepared the vocabulary and grammar for the Classical French (le français classique) spoken in the 17th ...
French is a Romance language (meaning that it is descended primarily from Vulgar Latin) that specifically is classified under the Gallo-Romance languages.. The discussion of the history of a language is typically divided into "external history", describing the ethnic, political, social, technological, and other changes that affected the languages, and "internal history", describing the ...