Writing French

target: fr — French, français, written left to right in the Latin alphabet: the studio cannot tell it from the prose, so every run of it is marked.

1. Every run is marked#

Any mark sets a word or a group as French: […]{tl}, French’s code […]{fr}, a colour, a pronunciation, or any other word in the braces but la, ltr and math.

---target: fr---[bonjour]{translit:bõʒour} = *hello*, [les amis]{teal translit:lé-zami} = *the friends*,and [la pomme]{fr} = *the apple*.[Il pleut sur la ville.]{tl bg=quote}

A whole paragraph marked […]{tl} is a block, and takes bg=; inside a line the options are not read. There are no automatic paragraphs and no display lines. A wrong form is a marked run after ✗: ✗[les amies]{tl}.

French quotation marks are guillemets, which the editor’s «» button types; they are ordinary punctuation to the studio.

2. Face#

French is set in the prose’s own face, TeX Gyre Pagella, at the prose’s size; it has no second face and is not set vertically.

3. Vocabulary entries#

Any ## heading with two parts or more is a vocabulary entry, so a section title in a French document cannot hold a |.

---target: fr---## fromage | fròmaʒ | Latin *formaticus*, shaped in a mould | = *cheese*

4. Pronunciation#

In French the pronunciation is worth giving for almost every word: the spelling keeps letters the language stopped saying long ago. It is a respelling, not IPA, written in lower case, without punctuation, and for the whole word or group:

• vowels: a; é closed and è open; e only for the mute e of le; i; o closed and ò open; ou; ü the u of tu; eu;
• nasals: ã (an, en), ẽ (in, ain, un), õ (on) — nothing sounded after them: bon bõ, but bonne bòn;
• glides: y (billet biyè, bien byẽ), w (moi mwa), ü before a vowel (lui lüi);
• consonants as English and Italian read them, g always hard, s always hissed, plus ʃ (chat ʃa), ʒ (je ʒe) and ɲ (montagne mõtaɲ); never c h j q x;
• a silent letter is not written (petit peti);
• a liaison takes a hyphen, the sounded consonant at the head of the next word (les amis lé-zami), and the hyphen means nothing else;
• an elision makes one word (l’homme lòm);
• the mute e written where it is said and left out where it is not (samedi samdi); no stress marked; no letter doubled.

---target: fr---[merci beaucoup]{translit:mèrsi bokou}, [un grand homme]{translit:ẽ grã-tòm},[la montagne]{teal translit:la mõtaɲ}.

French has no reading: kana: means nothing here.