LESSON NOTES

All About S1 #2
The French Writing System

CONTENTS
2 Grammar

# 2
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GRAMMAR

The Focus of This Lesson is the French Writing System

The French writing system uses the Latin or Roman alphabet of the Roman Empire, just like
English, plus five diacritics1 (the circumflex accent, acute accent, grave accent, cedilla, and
dieresis2 ) and two ligatures (æ, œ) as its writing system. The accent marks mainly create
phonetics for words, while the ligatures æ and œ are obligatory contractions of ae and oe in
certain French words (as in sœur, meaning "sister").

Origin of the French Writing System

Its first version (close to Latin) appears in writing in 842 A.D. in the Strasbourg Oaths, which
formed alliances between two descendants of Charlemagne against their third brother to rule
the inherited Empire divided among the three.

Then the French writing system evolved with the languages of the various invaders, including
la langue d'oil (dialects of the Frankish Kingdom and Norse) and la langue d'oc (dialects of
south and southwestern France), with both oil and oc meaning "yes."
The ancient origin of the Latin alphabet itself can be traced to the Cumae form of the Greek
alphabet, from which a variety of other alphabets evolved to be used in the Italic languages.3

Knowing that French...

• uses the Latin alphabet, which is a major part of international communication since it
is one of the most widely used alphabets; six of the twelve international languages of
the world-French, Spanish, German, English, Italian, and Portuguese-use the Latin
alphabet

• has many common vocabulary roots with romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese,
French, Italian, Romanian, etc.)

...will help you survive with limited knowledge of these languages in many parts of the world,
such as Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking countries as well as Italy, and the many other
countries where French is widely spoken or is the official language.

The French Alphabet

The word "alphabet" refers to a writing system that has characters (graphemes) for
representing both consonant and vowel sounds (phonemes). Ideally, each letter represents
one speech sound (grapheme-phoneme correspondence), which practically is not always the
case.

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The current French alphabet consists of five vowels and twenty-one consonants, and thus it
has twenty-six characters. It also uses accent marks, also called diacritics,1 that create
phonetic, semantic, or etymological meanings for words.

We form French words by combining letters into syllables and syllables into words.

To form syllables, we use the thirty-seven phonemes, which are divided into nineteen vowels
and eighteen consonants, and more than 130 graphemes.
A phoneme corresponds to a unit of sound, and a grapheme is the written code of this
sound. In French, there are many graphemes for one sound. For example, the graphemes -
en, -an, -em, -am, -aon, -aen have an identical sound.

You can also add prefixes or suffixes (a group of determined letters) to a word to form new
words: we place a prefix before the word and a suffix after a word. For example, to create
opposites of some words, which are called antonyms, add dé-; when we add dé- to brancher
("to connect" or "plug in"), it becomes débrancher ("to disconnect" or "unplug").

If you know the French writing system and are familiar with the Latin alphabet, you will better
understand its applications in the romance languages still spoken today. This will allow you to
evaluate the spelling of any single one and better understand how romance languages
function.

Therefore, you will also be able to learn in an easier and more efficient way an additional
language, such as, for example, one of the most popular languages today for business or
communication throughout the globe-Spanish.

The French Alphabet - L'alphabet français

Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll M
m

[ɑ] [be] [se] [de] [ə] [ɛf] [ʒe] [aʃ] [i] [ʒi] [ka] [ɛl] [ɛm]

Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv W Xx Yy Zz
w

[du [igʀ [zɛ

bləv ɛk] d]
[ɛn] [o] [pe] [ky] [ɛʀ] [ɛs] [te] [y] [ve] [iks]
e]

Birth of Accents

It was also during the sixteenth century that accents began to appear. With the invention of the
printing press, printers looked for ways to eliminate ambiguity and redundant letters. The
solution to these problems was the use of accents and other markings. For example, in 1530,
the French introduced the cedilla as a means of making it clear that the c was soft before a, o,
and u (up till then, printers had used -ce-, -ss-, -ch- or just -c-).

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1 Diacritic: small sign added to a letter to alter its pronunciation or to distinguish between
similar words.

2 Dieresis: pronunciation of two adjacent vowels in two separate syllables, as in the word
"cooperate" (with the syllables "co" and "operate").

3 Italic languages: a subfamily of the Indo-European languages including the Romance

languages (Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, Latin, etc.).

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