Talk:French orthography

message: In the "major IPA" columns of many of the charts a symbol that often recurs is 'Ø' (significantly not enclosed in / /'s as most of its counterpart are), an upper-case letter 'O' (or perhaps just an oval shape) with a slash over it.  A quick search through various IPA-related articles in Wikipedia and a few external articles failed to turn up any reference to it, although, confusingly, there is an IPA vowel symbol consisting of a lower-case letter 'o' with a slash over it.
It may be that this is intended to represent a "null sound" or no sound at all.  In any case if this symbol is to remain in use there needs to be some legend or footnote describing its meaning.  Mrnatural (talk) 19:24, 28 March 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I believe it's meant for a phonologically null sound. See Zero_(linguistics). 129.120.246.12 (talk) 15:08, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  unexplained symbol 

message: "It is also added above the feminine adjectival ending -e when the masculine form ends in -gu: aigu, ambigu → aiguë, ambiguë."
After the spelling reforms, this became "aigüe", "argüe", etc.  The Jade Knight 06:26, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I disagree. The spelling reforms mandated that "aiguë" become "aigüe", that "argue" become "argüe", etc., but no one actually followed those reforms, and eventually the Academy decided to make them optional. (This might be worth noting in the article, but not by incorrecting the existing text.) —RuakhTALK 14:41, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually this reform was released as a "recommendation" (you should) and not not as a mandatory rules. As far as I know a there is now a prescription (you shall) by the "Education Nationale" to teach this new orthography to children at the primary school. I personally agree with this part of the reform (use of ü ë ï ä) because it is a very simple and regular rule.
Problem with this reform is : books are still released with the "old" orthography.--Overkilled (talk) 07:26, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  arguë 

message: There is a lot of good content in this recently-added and quickly-expanding section. I am concerned, however, about the reliance on a single source (TLFi) for pronunciation, especially for vowels. Furthermore, going from individual dictionary entries to what apparently aims to be an exhaustive list of general spelling-to-pronunciation rules constitutes original research. I added a reference to Fouché (1956), still (I believe) the most complete description, but more recent citations are needed. The main problem, though, is that when this section is finished (with all the rules and all the exceptions), it will be as a long as a book. Or too long to be useful, anyway, without adding some more structure to the lists of rules to guide the reader. CapnPrep (talk) 17:04, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for making your points: I think your concern about OR is valid here.  I've moved the section to my userspace: we should think about how to come up with a useful section that is fully sourced.  Grover cleveland (talk) 04:58, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  G-to-p section 

message: This not an easy section because the written language was not standardised prior the creation of the "Académie Française" in 1635 in the period called Classical French. Orthography changes in older periods were (and it probably the same with English) mostly lead by the evolution of the language itself: a kind of compromise between the local pronunciation and the old or traditional spelling derived from the etymology.
A French Canadian would probably more efficient than me to fill in this section nevertheless few is still better than nothing. So I will try to help by the reading of :fr:Histoire de la langue française maybe with some examples borrowed there on some current words spelling.--Overkilled (talk) 10:42, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  History of French orthography 

message: No mention? Mcewan (talk) 14:03, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ligatures 

message: There are no IPA transcriptions of the vowels. A bare list is of little use. --Vuo (talk) 17:03, 29 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pronunciations missing 

message: Why is ç used instead of s? Given that ç started out as Visigothic z, how come it's used like it is?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.139.86.185 (talk) 19:27, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Because as in English, in French you pronounce the s between vowels like a z. If you still want it to be pronounced as a normal s, you have to use ç.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.116.192.126 (talk) 18:30, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  Because in old French the letter z and ç and c before e/i/y were all pronounced like /ts/. This evolved from the palatalized c sound in Latin, like Italian /tʃ/ or Spanish /θ/. In French then as it moved towards Middle and Modern French this sound shifted and ended up loosing the /t/ sound and simplifying the phoneme to /s/. ç represents a c that shifted to an /s/ sound but no longer has the light vowel e/i/y to signify this pronunciation, so the tail is used for this (etymologically or because of the combined ending): face + -ade = façade. 2WR1 (talk) 18:20, 5 July 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  ç 

message: I have the same reservations about this section as I did for Grover cleveland's additions back in early 2008 (as discussed above). I didn't notice when Mark J added these tables in December 2010, otherwise I would have said something at the time. It's clear from the other discussion above that people expect to see a list like this in the article. So be it. But the classification into "major values" vs. "minor values" is definitely OR, or at best an original synthesis of information from unidentified sources. Does anyone feel strongly about maintaining it? Also, I don't see the point of having a column for "Exceptions" in all three tables just to mention solennel and oignon. CapnPrep (talk) 07:56, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sound to spelling correspondences 

message: The combination "oe" is missing (I don't mean "œ"). I think it's generally pronounced like "oi".--95.116.192.126 (talk) 18:34, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  la poêle 

message: It is stated that letter b is pronounced as /p/ next to a voiceless consonant. Does it mean that b is located after a voiceless consonant? If it is so, it seems to be wrong. Shouldn't it be "before a voiceless consonant" instead? Ermishin (talk) 05:23, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  "next to voiceless consonant" meaning 

message: In the Diacritics section, the quotations are not translated. This is the English Wikipedia, and one would guess that if a user visits this page then they would not be familiar with the French language to begin with.
I will translate with Google Translate, but I urge all contributors with French knowledge to please fix my attempt.
Tebello TheWHAT!!?? 08:45, 31 July 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Missing translations of French passages 

message: It was rumoured that this ligature was intended to be removed. This article needs more info on this. 178.49.152.66 (talk) 12:35, 3 January 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Œ situation 

message: Hi, the alphabet names for the french letters are incorrect; those are actually for the Spanish alphabet.
Mr. Nushmutt (talk) 20:48, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: They are correct. You need to pronounce the names following French spelling, so something like "effe" is pronounced /ɛf/, not /ɛfɛ/ as in Spanish. 82.245.24.4 (talk) 20:39, 15 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  incorrect alphabet names 

message: Clarify meaning of "as named dog’s parsley". ZFT (talk) 03:52, 13 May 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Æ 

message: Should a line be added for the letter ÿ in the 'Vowels and combinations of vowel letters' section? I know it's only used in place names really, but there are demonyms used as examples for other vowels or vowel combinations.
2WR1 (talk) 05:35, 25 May 2017 (UTC)
replies: text:  Well I added it, if anyone disagrees with its inclusion then we can talk about it here. My reasoning is that geographic names are already used as examples for other letters and combinations of letters. 2WR1 (talk) 18:32, 5 July 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  ÿ 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: In the charts section, it seems there's some trouble figuring out how represent certain pronunciations that are more or less specific to conjugations. So I thought It's better to discuss it here so maybe we can figure out something that works best.
* First theres the pronunciations (not considering the common /a/-/ɑ/ merger) for 'â'. The exceptions are for the conjugations ending in -âmes, -âtes, and -ât. But then there is also the word 'dégât' for which /a/ is an alternative pronunciation. SO the exception cannot be fully attributed to the conjugations.
* Then for 'ai' theres two: the conjugations ending in -ai or -rai must always be pronounced /e/, but for words like 'ai', 'baisser', 'aiguille', 'gai', and 'quai' /ɛ/ is always an alternative, so there's no easy way to show that only for some of these the pronunciation /ɛ/ is possible but for the conjugations it never is. Then there's 'ai' in the conjugations of 'faire' where it's pronounced /ə/. It's been easily enough explain by the little note, but I recently discovered the word 'faisan' also shares this exception, which makes a problem.
* There's also -ez, which maybe should be moved to the vowels and consonants combination section along with -ent? Just a thought, it's handled okay right now.
* Also for eu/eû exceptional pronunciation /y/ from 'avoir', I feel like those are handled well enough.
The main thing I think is that it sort of makes the charts look messy and harder to read when there's a bunch of long descriptions of certain exceptions, it makes it hard to find the words that are being mentioned through all the English explanation, so I feel like those should be kept to a minimum, which I guess is what I'm trying to do.
My thought right now is to put conjugation-specific exceptions in the third exceptional value slot, and, if they share that exception with a few other words, to list the conjugation example last in the list so that a short explanation of that specific exception can be placed after the list of words so as to make it very clear which words are French examples and which words are English explanations. I'm also thinking decreasing the font size for any words that are not purely the examples themselves in the charts could be helpful for readability. So I'll try putting all of this into action and see if it looks better. But I would love any input or opinions anyone has so we can discuss it here.
Thanks!
2WR1 (talk) 20:27, 20 July 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  conjugation specific pronunciations  

message: I tried implementing small text using '< + small + >' for any information in the examples sections of the charts that isn't specifically a French word example. This is a convention used in the English Orthography page so I thought it might help here too. I think it looks really good and contributes to readability, but what do other people think? If no-one else likes it I can reverse it. Thanks! 2WR1 (talk) 21:02, 20 July 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  small text 

message: It seems that the sound to spelling correspondences section had been marked as "possibly containing original research". I've done a lot of work there trying to find exceptional spellings and organize the charts well and make sure they cover all the quirks of French spelling. Anything I have added has been found and can be easily looked up in French dictionaries and I've also checked everything that was preexisting. Can someone please clarify to me why specifically this section has been marked as possibly containing original research? And let me know what needs to be done to make it acceptable? Does every single word need to be cited to a dictionary entry? I feel like this must be overkill and would make the charts very messy looking, so I'd like to know what actually needs to be done. Thanks! 2WR1 (talk) 21:02, 8 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: It seems that this is something that I just missed for a while because the notice has been there since 2012 apparently. I found the user who added the notice, , but I can't tell if they're still an active user. 2WR1 (talk) 21:19, 8 July 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sound to spelling correspondences and original research 

message: Is the Digraphs & Trigraphs section needed, couldn’t it be deleted?, it doesn’t add anything & the corresponding phonemes for them are already covered in Sound to spelling correspondences. 78.17.143.44 (talk) 22:36, 3 April 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Digraphs & Trigraphs 

message: How to pronounce -er in French words? 109.106.227.160 (talk) 20:26, 15 July 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  œ 

message: The pronunciation of the word assez seems to be another exception to the rule that ⟨e⟩ is pronounced as /ɛ/ before a final consonant, silent or pronounced, as it is formulated in the article. Similarly, the grave accent in the word après seems to be unnecessary according to the same rule. Could the description of this rule be expanded by those who know French? — GPodkolzin Talk 15:25, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Added assez. As for final -ès, it is /ɛ/, whereas final -es is silent. Burzuchius (talk) 18:05, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Treatment of ⟨e⟩ and ⟨è⟩ in final syllables 

message: In the vowel and consonant table “/ɑs/ in the 18th century and still traditional French approximation of Laws, the colloquial Scottish form of the economist John Law's name." is given as an exception for aw, though this is true, I believe this this is such a rare exception that it should be removed from the table since then one could possibly add a practically infinite amount of French approximations of foreign names. 2A01:B340:66:E6D7:D5F2:8B0A:2DD9:C5E7 (talk) 10:34, 14 October 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Law