Amusing. It turns out that ù in French exists solely for one single word où (where). Also interesting, the accent mark ^ over a letter, like in û, effectively represents a shortened form of S. For example, forêt, hôpital – these essentially mean forest, hospital, where the s has flown away both in written and spoken language, into the heavens. Likewise, croûton (from croûte) fundamentally comes from the word crust. Similarly, île/isle, hôtel/hostel, bête/beste (beast), côte/coste (coast). Even château — it’s essentially related to castel/castle. The same applies to the beginning of words: école/school, épice/species. And yet, French almost lacks words containing the letter w (but the letter exists!)
Furthermore, it’s intriguing that French and Italian have a lexical similarity of 89%—which means that 89% of the words in these languages are very similar to each other. Hence, it is considered that if the lexical similarity exceeds 85%, they are not languages but dialects 🙂
Also remembering now, in the 18th century, at least in 1789, 50% of the French did not speak French. Predominantly, they spoke in languages of the “langue d’oïl” group and in Occitan dialects. France would need the development of schools to spread the French language. Also interesting, more people speak French in Africa than in France itself.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 