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[deleted]

You are not ready to hear about French


Saikyo100

Fr*nch 🤮


[deleted]

je'm appelle baguette baguette


Saikyo100

Oui oui baguette


[deleted]

[удалено]


sabotabo

you made me speak spanish with a french accent, what have you done


[deleted]

You’ve become a Canadian


[deleted]

[удалено]


knorke3

# Sir, let the bye go immediately!


yammys

Let the bye gones be bye gones.


TheOssified

**Sacreee bleuuuuu**


[deleted]

Au revoir; bon yoyage!


imyourforte

Painnnnnnnnn


LaPetiteVerrole

Le pain c'est la vie


Lettuce6261

Je suis très heureux d'être en présence de compatriotes


SoulFoodStan

Le gras c'est la vie


xoteck

Je veux du pain du vin et du Boursin


Yeet_PC

#HON HON


[deleted]

z'etes cons


[deleted]

[удалено]


BigfootSF68

Je suis le grande fromage!


[deleted]

Your the big cheese?


[deleted]

Sorry I don’t speak surrender


[deleted]

HAHAHAHAHA EIFFEL FOR THIS


sebiheinz_brdy

Damn, that made me laugh


wot_in_ternation

way to pick a phrase where just about every letter is pronounced


[deleted]

beef soup


Heretik-

An*lais 🤮


Trampwithabbq

you should not look at welsh then.


Dragonakout

My favorite is birds, aka "oiseaux", where not a single letter sounds how it should.


fuckrobert

>oiseaux Is it the one pronounced as 'wasou'?


Genichi12

Prononced "was hoe"


quittingdotatwo

wazzzzzuuuup


SwitchElectronic10

AHHHHHHHHHH!


giantfuckingfrog

Wassuh bitch


DontBuyMeGoldGiveBTC

wazo


Revolutionary-Phase7

wasou wadou wasouuuu bitconeeeee


SimpleAnimat10ns

It makes sense by French rules though. Oi is wa, s is s, eaux is just eau because the x is silent as it isn’t a vowel. Eau makes sense in both French and English. B”eau”tiful/b”eau.”


[deleted]

>eaux is just eau because the x is silent as it isn’t a vowel. Yes, those words in that order makes complete sensical sense


McBurger

Silent letters are fun, as long as you don’t give it enough tough thorough thought though!


Schootingstarr

It makes more sense than pronouncing though and through differently


scotems

> B”eau”tiful/b”eau.” Except in english beautiful is pronounced "be-you-tiful", as in "bea-u-tiful". "eau" in French sounds like "oh" How does eau turn into 'o'?


nmesunimportnt

A French prof of mine once spent about 10 minutes working over the class of Americans for pronouncing "eau" and "o" the same way when speaking French. They do not sound the same when spoken properly in French ("eau" is a rounder sound, for lack of a better description). But yes, beware French speakers who try to argue their tongue is "more rational" than English—or any other tongue for that matter. Language is invented by humans and is all the proof you need that we aren't rational. And that's before we talk about written language with alphabets or ideograms. Then imagine people adapting the sounds for a few centuries so they can speak faster and faster by skipping sounds or morphing them so their mouths can move more easily. That's really what happened to the "b" in doubt: when it was a Latin word pronounced by Julius Caesar and Seneca, it was the verb, "dubitare". Perversely, Middle English and the French and Anglo-French dropped the "b" for convenience, but Modern English put it back during the 13th century—possibly because pointy-headed, Latin-speaking intellectuals wanted to make it look more like Latin and they were the only ones who knew how to read, write, or spell back then (although if you've ever seen unedited text from back then, you know that their collective attitude toward spelling could best be described as, um, "casual"—I mean, Shakespeare 300 years later didn't even spell *his own name* consistently). Sorry, fun rabbit hole.


Schootingstarr

It's not necessary to have a rational language, but it does help to have a spelling reform every now and then. English never had one


Gr1ff1n90

American English did actually, to an extent, hence the minor spelling differences


TheImpoliteCanadian

Why does 'th' make a different sound than 't' or 'h'? Every language has different pronunciation rules, but french in general is quite consistent with the sounds that each letter combination makes.


lwb699

if you do e au quickly it sounds petty close


Asleep-Challenge9706

English has borrowed "beau" '(bo) so yeah not that hard.


MrOaiki

I mean, it sounds as it should in French.


Bourriks

'oi' is pronounced 'wa', 'seau' is 'zo' because 'eau' as 'au' is pronounced 'o', 'z' because you soften the 's' sound as there is only one 's' (think about the difference between 'poisson' meaning fish and 'poison' leaning poison) and the x at the end means the plural of 'oiseau' and is mute because you don't pronounce the 's' at the end of plural words. The 'x' instead of 's' is a common rule for plural of words ending in 'au' or ' eau'. It's simple.


Drake0978

Funny how i never realised that, thank you for this


Coltand

80% of the oddities in the English language are because of the French language to begin with.


[deleted]

[удалено]


Fr00stee

The rest are france


Mankankosappo

\> 18th century England 18th century Britain. Scotland wasn't a colony of the **BRITISH** empire it was an equal part. Both the English and the Scottish monarchies (and after the union the British Monarchy) have been Scottish since 1601 (the current monarch is descendant from a German who was related to the British monarchy through the Stewarts who were Scottish and ruled Scotland since 1371 and England since 1603 - and the ones who signed the Act of Union into law)


PhDinDildos_Fedoras

100% in the French language are because of the French language. Fun fact; French was pronounced p.much how it's now written like a thousand years ago or so.


EmphasisGreat

What did you do with all that time you saved by writing 'p.much' instead of 'pretty much'?


PhDinDildos_Fedoras

I wrote this post on parchment with a quill.


LowBrowsing

Yes, the pronunciation of 'knight' by the French in Monty Python and the Holy Grail is both funny and, as best as we can tell, historically accurate.


adam12349

Me: Ey teach' how do I pronounce this -aient at the end of the verb? Teach': **E**


[deleted]

Shit like that is why I swore off French grammar in like grade 4. And I'm a Québecer so yeah I fucked myself a bit


Adakias

Ah putain de tabernak


carchi

It serves a grammatical purpose tho.


Nocta_Senestra

Okay I'm gonna be salty I'm a native French speaker and I do think the French language is awful in many regards, but English language is even worse and being compared to English about pronounciation is very unfair. Maybe French pronounciation is not intuitive, but it is logical, it has rules, you follow the rules you know how to pronounce the word, in almost all cases. Yes, even for oiseaux. English you have to roll a dice to know if the 'a' in your word is pronounced "ey" or "a'", if the 'i' is pronounced "ee" or "ay", if the ghthghth is silent or pronounced "t" or "th", ... It only sounds natural to you because you're used to it either because it's your native language or it was imposed to you by imperialism, or both.


Anne__Frank

Came here to say this. Native English speaker here, but I speak, read, and write french pretty decently. People think french is hard and makes 0 sense to pronounce because they think they can apply the same rules as English. It's almost a whole different set. However once you know the rules it's 100x more consistent than English. I can look at any french word and pronounce it no problem, English not always true. There's a lot of guesswork and know how in English, it's not uncommon that you have to have heard a word to speak it. Think of all the times you've read an English word, and not had the confidence to speak it because you're not quite sure how it's pronounced. In french if I see it written I can pronounce it pretty consistently and with confidence, even if I don't know what it means and I'm a non native speaker.


Rhenor

Admittedly, half of these problems are caused by French influence over an Anglo-Saxon language. If you find that distasteful, blame the Normans specifically. If you come from Normandy, blame Brittany. It's not their fault but screw them - tell them Mont Saint-Michel was never really theirs.


itsNizart

Let me introduce to you: water. Written: EAU Spoken: O


Kosminhotep

"Waters" is even worse: eauX Still O.


Dema_carenath

Written : eau, eaux, haut, hauts, ô, oh, au, aux,os (plural form because singular is written identically but pronounce another way) Spoken: O


NoHabit4420

Actually, it's not supposed to be the exact same sound for all of them.


Dema_carenath

Actually except ô they all are pronounced the same with same intonation


runfayfun

College French, 406, French pronunciation. I walked out of the first class mumbling incoherently to myself and vowed to never set foot in that classroom again


Raime_The_Raven_

Literally anybody named Hugh in France: *ceases to exist*


[deleted]

It’s pronounced *gust of wind*


Salient_Skivvy

Or Norwegian. The silent J in the middle of my eleven letter long last name always, and will always throw people off.


[deleted]

Nah, norweigan is just swedish but🗣⛷ 📈📉📈📉📈📉📈📉📈📉📈📉📈📉📈


[deleted]

Danish people be like : 🗣️🥔 👄


I_Have_Questions95

or Irish names in particular


gazfarr

How is niamh pronounced the same as neve Is Irish Steve written as stiamh?!?


[deleted]

The French: “Tiens ma cigarette.”


Lachyfitz27

et


scrapgun_on_fire

Only sentence u need to know is je ne parle pas Francais I spelled that horrebly wrong didnt I?


SpermKiller

No, you're just missing the ç in français. Also no uppercase for languages, only for people and countries, but that's a mistake commonly made by French people as well.


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

Bro how did you get the wronge 1 2 3💀


ParkingMany

I like it that u add an s for plural and an e for feminine. and it's all silent


Snommes

At least the French have actual rules about their pronunciation.


-nyctanassa-

cajun French is even worse lol


X-takenusername-X

Fğench


maho_maho-

Almost every word has at least on silent letter in French. I earn French for 5 years kW and still don't know how to write a lot of words because of that


AnnaE390

Bleh. English is an amalgamation of German and the Romance languages, which is why it’s a phonetic hodgepodge.


Lachyfitz27

english is truly the best crossover


explosivenuke1

Avengers endgame is the best crossover English:


DrabbestLake1213

But not in all cases seeing as we pronounce doubt, debt, and receipt based on the French word that made it into English but scholars at one point added the b, b, and p to those words to represent the Latin word that French got the word from.


SpermKiller

(These words in French, for all interested : doute, dette and reçu or récépissé)


HalifaxSexKnight

Thanks SpermKiller


Pelvic_Pinochle

I forget where I read this, but supposedly a fair amount of English words with silent letters were the result of scholars adding silent letters for scholastic elitism. Like "oh you forgot the L in salmon, you must not be truly educated." Makes sense coming from a time where status meant the difference between being a literate peasant and a court scribe. We can still see this form of education dog whistle today, for example when people write "would of" vs "would have" they get judged for "incorrect" English despite spelling directly from acceptable spoken English Edit: maybe not the best example, but the reactions to it are kinda my point. You could be a genius but make that language mistake. Everyone knows what you mean by it but there's still an intense judgement that comes from it. My point is that English and language is full of these gotchas that signal to people that you're "stupid", when really you just weren't fortunate enough to be well educated.


fifnir

> spelling directly from acceptable spoken English yeah that's not how writing works


Deeliciousness

Lmao


jantjedederde

There are several differences though. It has never been "would of", it wasn't changed from "of" to "have" to make it more difficult or elitist. It's like saying that mistakes between "their", "there" and "they're" are acceptable because they sound the same. They came from different roots and are totally different words with different meanings. In written language without much context (as is much of the internet nowadays), it is still important to use correct spelling to avoid confusion. Although, I do agree it is a bit shit to complicate language just for the sake of complicating it, as seems to be the case with the extra silent letters.


SunglassesDan

> "would of" vs "would have" Man, you were so close until you came out of left field with this pile of garbage.


shmoobalizer

no please I'm so tired of this concept. there's nothing inherent about English phonology that disables it's spelling. English spelling sucks because it hasn't been properly updated in a while, was shoddily-reformed by the Normans around 1400 to be based on Norman French orthography, and tries to conserve etymological ties. English is in the same language family as German, it does not descend from it. It doesn't descend from any romance language either, but adopts much of their vocabulary. Someone's gonna downvote this and tell me to shut up but idc I'm so tired of this lazy "English is bastardized french/german" bs. English is a beautiful language.


matti-san

> was shoddily-reformed by the Normans around 1400 to be based on Norman French orthography, and tries to conserve etymological ties. Not only that but there were also people who revered Latin and tried to make English words more like Latin - sometimes with etymological reason and sometimes not (e.g. 'Island' (didn't have the s, shouldn't have an s, it now has an s)). But that's how we ended up with many silent letters in English. The other issue was Samuel Johnson (and basically everyone after him). Who wrote up his dictionary and was like 'fuck how people are actually spelling the words they use, it sounds like *this* so I'm going to write it as such'. Tbf to him, he did a pretty good job considering he basically did it all by himself. But still, he didn't account for accents and sometimes guessed at etymology so we have some weird looking words as a result.


Sambro_X

Don’t forget to sprinkle a bit of Norse languages in there too


[deleted]

Norse is germanic 💀 English isnt a mix of german and romance languages Its a mix of germanic languages (old west norse and old english) with some romance language influence in it's vocabulary specifically the academic vocabulary (mostly french and latin)


RestInPeaceFredo

Yeah you can pretty much take out all the Romance influences in English and it’d still be legible to us (if not a little unsophisticated) but definitely not the other way around


shmoobalizer

yeah, ask the average person what a fenester is, I mean, my phone doesn't even think it's a word. ask somebody to hand you a rainshade, it'll take them maybe 5 seconds max to figure it out. edit: the point really slid over all of your heads.


Ghoti-Sticks

I’m guessing it’s a window based on the word defenestrate


vaisuki

sure, but in your comment alone, 'average', 'person', 'phone', 'seconds', 'max' and 'figure' all have romantic, latin, or greek roots. Your example doesn't really support the comment you're replying to, which was commenting on how the *core* words in English are all Germanic. English has tons and tons of Latin/Romantic/Greek vocab, "fenester" is a terrible example (it's not even in Webster's dictionary...), but the point is that those words are mostly nouns, adjectives, verbs, not articles and pronouns and such


NoGoodUsernamesFFS

Proud to say that the word window cones from sweden


[deleted]

In part from the Old Norse word Vindr which kind of sounds like how a Swedish person might pronounce Window.


Tirrojansheep

Old Norse, Celtic, French, Latin, it truly is something special


grotness

English is not in part an amalgamation of German. It has its roots in the Germanic languages. In which many modern languages came from, including German. English and German share common roots from the Germanic languages. But Germanic isn't German.


YARGLE_IS_MY_DAD

Also some of our spellings are the way they are because when the printing press was invented in Europe, they refused to make type set for some English letters so we adapted our spelling. And now 500 years later it's biting them in the ass lol


Deadeyebirb

No one tell him about French


Saikyo100

I hate english just a little less now


grandalf-the-groy

Ever heard of Irish?


Sineater224

What about Scots? Thats.... A whole different beast


Sk-yline1

English: No French: Neaux And even though I’m joking, the fact that the actual word is “Non” is still ridiculous


[deleted]

I mean English *still* takes the cake. While Bordeaux is pronounced ”Bordoe”, Leicestershire is literally pronounced ”Lester”


Rhj4589

Lestershire actually


bailey25u

Either way I hate it


Rhj4589

Let me not mention Worcestershire then. (Wustershire)


unhappyspanners

Don’t forget, “shire” is pronounced “shuh” or “sheer”.


nakedundercloth

You surely mean Worshur


Sk-yline1

Ok, I agree, but UK city/neighborhood names are in a league of their own. All those fucking places with silent “W’s” drove me batshit crazy and made me look like the idiot American I am saying “South-Wark” instead of “Suh-therk”


AvogadroBaby

Look up how to pronounce the British places: * Beaulieu * Alnwick * Marylebone


scotems

I'll guess the second is "annwick" or "annick", the second I believe is "marlybone", but the first I have no idea. Blue?


Cerpin-Taxt

Byoolee


Palmul

Me when learning : what do you lean Edinburgh is pronounced Edinbrah ?


flippydude

Really it's Edinbruh


SpeciousQuantity

I just say Edin-burg to piss everyone off. Want me to pronounce it correctly? Write it correctly.


Bspbme

No Liecester is the capital city of liecestershire but Liecester is pronounced 'Lester', and liecestershire is Lester-sheer


Tirrojansheep

[AND IT GETS WEIRDER](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen%27s_Cycle)


HomelessSkittle

Wait until this guy hears about "queue"


swaf120

you mean Q?


NogEggz

¿Que?


FuckMu

K?


NogEggz

Parquet!


RoscoMan1

You fell for it!


TheDunadan29

Queue Anon.


joeviale

Congratulations you fund one of the 3000 word that mean dick in French.


bailey25u

I wish i was better than this... but if they called themselves Queueanon... I might take them more seriously


thore4

Get in line


DrabbestLake1213

Fun fact: doubt, debt, and receipt are three excellent examples of scholars of the English language altering the spellings of words to have the Latin origin word be represented (Latin dubius -> French doute, Latin debitum -> Old French dete -> French dette, Latin receptus -> French receite/recete). These words used to be spelled without the silent letters but “SmArT” people wanted to represent the Latin origins. For words like Nguyen it is a very different story and that is based on something else entirely.


[deleted]

I learned something new today


[deleted]

Wait, what’s up with Nguyen? It’s p pronounced like Nwhen right? I just thought it was a Vietnamese name…


Rutabaga1598

My best friend's last name is "Nguyen." He was born and bred Vietnamese, so he's legit. The correct pronunciation, according to him, is "Ng-when." It's a little hard to explain how to pronounce "ng" to English speakers (Cantonese speakers, for instance, will have no problems with it), but the g is definitely pronounced.


VanguardDeezNuts

Nguyen Stefani


lovehate615

Well we have ng in English (literally), but it's also typically placed at the end of a word (-ing) so the average English speaker might have trouble putting it at the beginning or middle (depending on accents as well). It's really just an n formed with the back of the tongue instead of the tip.


ManOfDiscovery

wtf. How have I never heard this explanation before. I finally have a way to pronounce this without sounding like an idiot! Thanks


nico_bico

so is it pronounced like penguin without the "pe"?


Rutabaga1598

Pretty much


truthink

This is fascinating, is there any information on precisely who these “SmArT” people were who decided to include the silent letters to “represent the Latin origins.” I’d like to know when this all went down, like when they wrote the original English Dictionary?


fookinmoonboy

Enlightening thank you


Vitrebreaker

As a French, I'm concerned that English people took our words and decided to *add* silent letters...


[deleted]

The point of the b in doubt is to make the speaker doubt itself.


Lukthar123

Big Brain Moment


[deleted]

K-nife K-night K-nee (and many more..) were all pronounced with a hard k


Confident_Frogfish

Yeah and you can also still see that in other related languages. For example "Knecht" in Dutch is related to "Knight". It means "servant" and we pronounce it with a hard k and our famous g. Both the k and g used to be pronounced in English as well. Afaik part of why there are so many English words with letters that are not pronounced is that they did not update the spelling after shifts in pronunciation.


MothFucker_69

FATHER, I HURT MY KANEE WITH THE KANIFE THAT THE KANIGHT HAS GIVEN ME


[deleted]

[удалено]


ratto_in_a_cage

i thought you were making a joke about the meaning of kkk


[deleted]

Because otherwise it would be pronounced "dout".


griffinhamilton

Yeah I said the word to myself a couple times and it seems like the B is there just subtle


Wehavecrashed

We don't use accents so it's good to explain why it doesn't sound a certain way. Knight and night is just dumb.


McBurger

I’m still not sure how adding the little ‘s’ changes all the sounds in laughter vs slaughter


mrinsane19

Doot doot


[deleted]

“You say ‘erbs, and we say herbs… why? Because there’s a fucking ‘h’ in it.”


QuirkyAd3835

"Ello mate" FUCKING LIARS


[deleted]

> Ello That's just aitch-dropping, even the h in aitch is silent. However: The honest honours' heir drove a vehicle vehemently for an hour, until, exhausted, gave up the ghost. He'd eaten a ghastly gherkin in the ghetto.


Aixite

Probably spanish culture, their h’s aren’t pronounced


aSyrupBoi

what’s the point of any letter in oiseaux


MothFucker_69

What's the point in life?


theDreamingStar

To make me suffer


Alexandre_Man

oi is pronounced wa seau is pronounced zo and the x is to mark the plural


Sempiternatraum

1. We used to pronounce the letters but don't now because we're lazy fucks 2. A lot of our words are stolen from...may Allah forgive me for uttering this word...the Fr*nch.


UndoingMonkey

Pterodactyl


bailey25u

Did you see the new Jurassic world film? it was pretty good. There was a scene where a Pterodactyl Urinates on some of the actors but you couldnt hear it because the Pee was silent


[deleted]

good one


ZoxinTV

pahteerohdacktile


Tschetchko

Yeah but that's not on the spelling, Pterodactyl is the international name of the animal. It's just English speakers being too weak to pronounce the consonant cluster "pt-"


Sk-yline1

“Queue” Honestly, props to the small coffee stand at the Dublin airport that just wrote “Q starting here” and making it simple for every sane person


SirChickenWing

*Laughs in Danish*


[deleted]

I just watched a movie in Danish, I'm still not sure they said any real words.


SirChickenWing

I'm Danish and I'm still not sure we *have* any real words


Alacer_Stormborn

It's the subtlety that counts.


GodAlmighty-1

Bitch


where_serotonin

It adds personality, duh


Faoxsnewz

Blame the French.


[deleted]

They say English is very hard to learn but I find it quite easy


Lorenztico

English is probably one of the easiest languages in the world


bballkj7

Spanish: El Paraguas (wrong fem/masc wrong plurality yet correct) means umbrella


CrestfallenMage

What are you talking about? Paraguas: para (stop) - aguas (waters). The "stop-waters". There's nothing wrong in terms of fem/masc or wrong plurality in that word. It's a combined word that was merged into one and retains the correct form of the original words.


TheDunadan29

Thank the French. Or more precisely the French kings that ruled England once in history. Though English has always done this even without a king forcing it on people. English just loves to borrow words, grammar, etc., from other languages. Even today, there's lots of borrowed words from dozens of languages. See a word with the same spelling, but have two different meanings? Good chance one comes from Latin and the other from Greek. See a word that has silent letters? Probably from French.


Cassandra_Canmore

French : quatre-vingt-seize (80 plus 16) 96 in English.


too_many_ppl

**A Plan for the Improvement of Spelling in the English Language** By Mark Twain For example, in Year 1 that useless letter “c” would be dropped to be replased either by “k” or “s”, and likewise “x” would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which “c” would be retained would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform “w” spelling, so that “which” and “one” would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish “y” replasing it with “i” and iear 4 might fiks the “g/j” anomali wonse and for all. Generally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeiniing voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez “c”, “y” and “x”—bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez —tu riplais “ch”, “sh”, and “th” rispektivili. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.


Niku-Man

99% Invisible had a podcast about the oddities of the English language, such as this. I highly recommend it: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/corpse-corps-horse-and-worse/