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     French is a Romance language, having descended from the ancient Latin of Rome. It has numerous interesting features that provide ample inspiration for the aspiring conlanger.

     1) Phonology:

     There are quite a few unique sounds in French that are not extremely common to the ears of an English speaker:

• Parisian French features the famous nasal vowels [ɛ̃], [ɔ̃], and [ɑ̃], in addition to the rounded front vowels [ø], [œ] and [y].
• French features the post-alveolar fricative [ʒ], the labialized palatal approximant [ɥ], the palatal nasal [ɲ], and in most dialects, the voiced uvular fricative [ʁ].
• In other dialects, the additional front rounded nasal vowel [œ̃] is used for the graphemes <un> and <um>.

     It’s important to note that when a “nasalized-vowel + consonant” combination occurs before a vowel in the orthography, the vowel is not nasalized, and the consonant is pronounced. Otherwise, the opposite is true.

     2) Tense, Aspect, and Mood

     French verbs are encoded with:

• 3 tenses: Past, Present, and Future.
• 4 moods: Subjunctive, Imperative, Conditional, and Indicative.
• 4 aspects: Perfective, Perfect, Simple, and Imperfect.
• Miscellaneous Non-finite Forms: Infinitive, Present Participle, Gerund, and Past Participle.

     Simple for Progressive use: French has no dedicated present progressive construction (the English am/are/is x-ing). Therefore, when translating this expression from English to French, we’d use the Simple aspect.

     “I am creating a conlang.” = “Je crée une langue construite.”

     Recent Past Tense: Another past construction may be used in French with the verb “venir de”, which means “to come from”. This expression is used for the recent past, and is equivalent to the English phrase “I have just x-ed”:

     “I have just created a conlang.” = “Je viens de créer une langue construite.”

      3) Noun Gender:

     French has 2 grammatical genders, Masculine and Feminine. This is a reduction from the 3 grammatical genders of Latin which included the Neuter.

     Most Masculine nouns end with a silent consonant, while most Feminine nouns end with a pronounced consonant.

     Adjectives and articles agree in gender with the nouns they modify:

     “La petite ville” (The little city) vs. “Le petit garçon” (The little boy)

     The way the silent-pronounced letter rule came about in relation to noun gender was that while the Latin masculine noun endings [us] and [um] were dropped, and the consonant before that was often deleted, the descendant of the feminine ending [a] remained long after the word-final consonant elimination.

     Eventually, the [a] became a schwa, and dropped off, leaving only the pronounced consonant to be a reminder of its presence.

     4) Double Negative:

     French has a double negative “ne…pas”, which is somewhat similar to the English negative which in most situations is “do not”.

     In between these two words a verb may be inserted, giving us something like: “Je ne crée pas des langues construites.” =  “I don’t make conlangs.”

     The word “pas”, cognate to the English “pace”, comes from the Latin word meaning “step”. Thus, the pre-grammaticalized phrase would literally be something like “I don’t create a step of conlangs”.

      5) Dedicated Indefinite Pronoun:

     The dedicated indefinite pronoun in the language is “on”, which comes from the Latin word for “man”.

     Among other uses,  “on” may be used for “we”,  “someone”,  “one”, or “people”.

     While verbs conjugate for the 3rd person singular with this pronoun (a remnant of the word’s origin as a singular noun), any adjectives agreeing with “on” may take the gender and number of what the indefinite pronoun is signifying.

     6) Formation of Questions:

     Questions in spoken French are typically formed through the interrogative phrase “Est-ce que…” literally “Is it that…”

     Various question words may be placed in front of this phrase in order to construct more precise questions such as:

     Quelle langues est-ce que vous aimez? (What languages do you like?)

     Quand est-ce que vous crée des langues construites? (When do you make conlangs?)

     7) Base-20 Counting System:

     Commonly believed to be a remnant of Celtic influence on the language, due to tradition, Parisian French uses base-20 for the numbers 70-99.

      70 = Literally 60-10 “soixante-dix”

     80 = Literally 4-20 “quatre-vingt”

     90 = Literally 4-20-10 “quatre-vingt-dix”

     99 = Literally 4-20-10-9 “quatre-vingt-dix-neuf”

     8) Partitive Number:

     French has a partitive number used for expressing a portion of a general noun. As in other languages, this element of grammar descended from the Ablative pronoun “de” and the definite article. In English, the partitive number is often translated through the word “some”. Thus:

     “Je veux boire de l’eau.” = “I want to drink some water.” = “I want to drink from the water.”

     9) Liason:

     As mentioned, numerous consonant endings to words in French were lost at various stages in the language. However, under particular circumstances, they may resurface when adjacent to another word beginning with a vowel. This phenomenon can often be seen through the normally final-consonant-silent words “mon” (my) and “les” (‘the’ pl.):

     Mon enfant [mɔ̃ nɑ̃.fɑ̃] = My child vs. Mon fils [mɔ̃ fis] = My son

     Les enfants [le zɑ̃.fɑ̃] = The children vs. Les fils [le fis] = The sons

     I hope you’ve enjoyed learning some of the interesting features of French, and that this has provided some inspiration for your next (or current) conlanging project!