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.
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.
Birth of Accents
It was also during the sixteenthcentury 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-).
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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A language’s alphabet is its building blocks. Trying to learn how to write in French without first learning its alphabet is a bit like trying to build a brick house without touching the individual bricks! It is impossible to do a good job that way. So don’t believe language schools and methods that try to teach you otherwise. You will regret it later.
With a language, like with anything you have to learn from scratch, having a few mnemonic devices handy are key to learning it fast. A mnemonic device is basically any method or technique that helps you to retain or commit something to memory more easily.
Bonjour Dennis,
Je te souhaite de faire de beaux progrès avec nous dans ce cas !
Bonne journée
Marion
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