Pimsleur Conversational French - Audio CD8CDs 16 Lessons Audio CDs play on Car/Portable/Home CD player |
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Pimsleur Conversational French - Audio CD - Learn to Speak FrenchBrand New : 8 CDs HEAR IT, LEARN IT, SPEAK IT About the French LanguageFrench is a Romance language originally spoken in France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland, and today by about 350 million people around the world as either a native or a second language, with significant populations in 54 countries. French is a descendant of the Latin of the Roman Empire, as are languages such as Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Catalan and Romanian. Its development was also influenced by the native Celtic languages of Roman Gaul and by the Germanic language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders. It is an official language in 31 countries, most of which form what is called in French La Francophonie, the community of French-speaking nations. It is an official language of all United Nations agencies and a large number of international organizations. French is written using the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, plus five diacritics (the circumflex accent, acute accent, grave accent, diaeresis, and cedilla) and the two ligatures (œ) and (æ). 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: * Old French doit > French doigt "finger" (Latin digitum) As a result, it is difficult to predict the spelling on the basis of the sound alone. Final consonants are generally silent, except when the following word begins with a vowel. For example, all of these words end in a vowel sound: pied, aller, les, finit, beaux. The same words followed by a vowel, however, may sound the consonants, as they do in these examples: beaux-arts, les amis, pied-à-terre. On the other hand, a given spelling will almost always lead to a predictable sound, and the Académie française works hard to enforce and update this correspondence. In particular, a given vowel combination or diacritic predictably leads to one phoneme.The diacritics have phonetic, semantic, and etymological significance. |
Pimsleur Conversational French - Audio CD |