French orthography

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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 spellings of many words are derived from Latin etymologies, which has resulted in a multitude of silent letters. Nevertheless, there are rules governing French orthography which allow for a reasonable degree of accuracy when producing French words from their written forms.

History of French orthography

This section requires expansion.

The oldest known French text, the Oaths of Strasbourg, dates back to 842 though there is a debate and some prefer the name "Roman" for this period.^[1] See also, in French, Histoire du français

Roman

The Celtic vernaculars of the inhabitants of Gaul disappeared progressively over the course of the Roman conquest as the Latin languages began to replace them: written (Classic) Latin and spoken (vulgar) Latin. Classic Latin, taught in schools, remained the language of religious services, of scientific works, of legislative acts and of certain literary works. Vulgar Latin, spoken by the Roman soldiers and merchants, and adopted by the natives, evolved slowly, taking the forms of different spoken Roman vernaculars according to the region of the country. These vernaculars divided into two branches in the Gallo-Romance language family: The langue d'oïl in the north of the Loire River, and the langue d'oc in the south.

Translated from the French Évolution de la langue française du Ve au XVe siècle See also in French Romance Languages and in English Romance languages

Old French

In the 9th century, the Romance vernaculars were already quite far from Latin. For example, to understand the Bible, written in Latin, footnotes were necessary. With consolidation of the royal powers, beginning in the 13th century, the Francien vernacular, in usage then on the Île-de-France, brought it little-by-little to the other languages and evolved toward Classic French.

The languages found in the manuscripts dating from the 9th century to the 13th century form what is known as Old French or ancien français. These languages continued to evolve until, in the 14th century to the 16th century, Middle French (moyen français) emerged.

Source: Ibid (See previous section). See also (in French) Ancien français

Middle French

Classical French

Modern French

In October 1989, Michel Rocard, then-Prime Minister of France, established the High Council of the French Language (Conseil supérieur de la langue française) in Paris. He designated experts — among them linguists, representatives of the Académie française and lexicographers — to propose standardizing several points, those points being:

• The uniting hyphen in some compound words
  Ie. grand-mère
• The plural of compound words whose meaning is not the same as the parts (mots composés) and that are connected by a hyphen.
  For example chauve-souris, meaning in French a bat (the animal) whereas without the hyphen the parts in reverse order would mean "a bald mouse"
• The circumflex accent ( ^ )
  As in hâte (haste)
• See also below Diacritics
• The past participle of reflexive (fr. pronominal) verbs
  Such as Je me lève; Je me suis levé(e)
• And other anomalies.

Quickly, the experts set to work. Their conclusions were submitted to Belgian and Québécois linguistic political organizations. They were likewise submitted to the l'Académie française, which endorsed them unanimously, saying :

Current orthography remains that of usage, and the "recommendations" of the High Council of the French language only enter into play with words that may be written in a different manner without being considered as incorrect or as faults.

The changes were published in the Official Journal of the French Republic (Journal officiel de la République française) in December 1990.

Translated from the French Rectifications Orthographiques

Alphabet

French is written using the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet and five diacritical marks, or diacritics. See French alphabet for details.

Diacritics

French makes use of five diacritics that can modify certain letters. Unlike in some languages, letters with diacritics are not considered to be separate letters; for example, the diacritics are ignored when alphabetizing a list of words. Further, the diacritics are often omitted from capital letters (with É being written as E, and so on), though strictly speaking, this is not considered correct, as it is merely a remnant of non-computerized printing that could not accommodate accented capital letters.

There are no letters that always need a diacritic to produce a given sound; rather, where a given letter has multiple possible sounds, a diacritic indicates that the sound that might be expected from the context is not the one that is used.

The acute accent (l'accent aigu) "´" is used only on the letter e. It normally indicates that the vowel is pronounced [e], as in épaule (shoulder) and détail (detail), when it might otherwise be read [ɛ] or [ə]. In certain syllables, however, é is written while the pronunciation in most dialects is [ɛ], as in céderai (I will give up) and réglementaire (regulatory); the 1990 spelling reform (see below) declared that in these cases, è should be used instead, but this spelling reform is not yet widely adopted.

The grave accent (l'accent grave) "`" is used on the letter e to indicate that it is pronounced [ɛ], as in manière (way) and après (after), when it is followed by a single consonant. It is also used on the letters a and u to distinguish certain homophones, such as ou (or) and où (where), and la (the) and là (there).

The cedilla (la cédille) "¸" is used only on the letter c, and only when the c is followed by a, o, or u (possibly with an accent); it indicates that the c is pronounced [s] (its "soft" pronunciation, that it ordinarily has only before e and i) rather than [k] (its "hard" pronunciation, that it ordinarily has elsewhere).

The circumflex (l'accent circonflexe) "^" can be used on any of the letters a, e, i, o, and u. It does not affect the pronunciation of i or u (except to lengthen them in dialects that retain the distinction between long and short vowels), and does not affect the pronunciation of a in most dialects (though in some, it changes [a] to [ɑ]). On o, it changes [ɔ] to [o], and on e, it produces [ɛ] (duplicating the function of the grave accent). The circumflex is chiefly a historical accent; it was added in the 19th century to certain words with an unpronounced s (e.g. forest → forêt) or another unpronounced letter (e.g. aage → âge).

The diaeresis (le tréma) shows that two vowels are pronounced separately (i.e., that the vowel pair is not a digraph) For example, Noël, naïf, and compare the forms of the verb haïr [aiʁ] (je hais [ɛ], nous haïssons [aisɔ̃]). It is normally written on the second vowel. It is also added above the feminine adjectival ending -e when the masculine form ends in -gu: aigu, ambigu → aiguë, ambiguë. The same practice is not followed, however, for verbs whose stem ends in -gu. For example, the forms of the verb arguer are exact visual rhymes with those of targuer, even though the two verbs are pronounced very differently ([aʁɡɥe] vs. [taʁɡe], j'argue [ʒaʁɡy] vs. je targue [ʒətaʁɡ]).

Digraphs and trigraphs

This section requires expansion.

French digraphs and trigraphs have both historical and phonological origins. In the first case, it is a vestige of the spelling in the word's original language (usually Latin or Greek) maintained in modern French, for example the use of <ph> in words like téléphone, <th> in words like théorème or <ch> in chaotique. In the second case, a digraph is due to an archaic pronunciation, such as <eu>, <au>, <oi>, <ai> and <œu>, or is merely a convenient way to expand the twenty-six-letter alphabet to cover all relevant phonemes, as in <ch>, <on>, <an>, <ou>, <un> and <in>. Some cases are a mixture of these, or are used for purely pragmatic reasons, such as <ge> for [ʒ] in il mangeait ("he ate"), where the <e> serves to "soften" the <g> inherent in the verb's root.

Digraphs

Vowels

• <ai> for [e] as in faire (to do)
• <au> for [o] as in chaud (hot)
• <ei> for [ɛ] as in neige (snow)
• <eu> for [ø] as in peu (few)
• <oi> for [wɑ] as in roi (king) or for [ɔ] as in oignon (onion)
• <ou> for [u] as in ou (or)

Nasalized vowels

• <an> for [ɑ̃] as in France
• <en> for [ɑ̃] as in vent (wind)
• <in> for [ɛ̃] as in vin (wine)
• <on> for [ɔ̃] as in bon (good)
• <un> for [œ̃] as in un (one or a)

Consonants

• <ch> for [ʃ] as in cheval (horse)
• <ge> for [ʒ] as in mangea (ate)
• <gn> for [ɲ] as in montagne (mountain)
• <gu> for [ɡ] as in langue (tongue)
• <ng> for [ŋ] as in camping
• <ph> for [f] as in téléphone
• <ss> for [s] as in baisser (to lower)
• <th> for [t] as in thème

Trigraphs and perhaps more

• <aon> for [ɑ̃] as in faon (fawn)
• <aou> for [u] as in saoul (drunk)
• <aoû> for [u] as in août (August)
• <eau> for [o] as in eau (water)
• <ien> for [jɛ̃] as in rien (nothing)
• <ion> for [jɔ̃] as in information
• <œu> for [œ] as in sœur (sister)
• <oin> for [wɛ̃] as in point

Words from Greek

The spelling of French words of Greek origin is complicated by a number of digraphs which originated in the Latin transcriptions. The digraphs <ph>, <th>, and <ch> are normally pronounced /f/, /t/, and /k/ in Greek loanwords, respectively; and the digraphs <ae> and <oe> are generally pronounced in Greek loanwords as though they were <e>. Further, many words in the international scientific vocabulary were constructed in French from Greek roots and have kept their digraphs (e.g., stratosphère, photographie).

French spelling reforms

Bibliography

• Fouché, Pierre (1956). Traité de prononciation française. Paris: Klincksieck. 
• Tranel, Bernard (1987). The Sounds of French: An Introduction. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-31510-7. 

See also

• Punctuation in French
• Elision (French)
• French phonology
• Spelling
• Use of the circumflex in French

References

External links

• alternate french spelling