• @[email protected]
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    413 months ago

    Wait until you hear the bastard child of French, germanic and a bunch of other languages. You can have a word like “lead” and you don’t even know how to pronounce it!

          • @[email protected]
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            3 months ago

            In the end, it’s all subjective but – if you’ll hear me out – thogh doesn’t alter the current spelling very much while maintaining a linguistic heritage (as the “thogh” spelling was also likewise used, during Middle English); also, the number of words ending in just the “o” vowel is less common, I feel, and will probably look doubly foreign to a native English speaker due to the consonant digraph (though, again, subjective; maybe not).

            However, – additionally – saving “oght” for “thought” is giving that letter combination a sound already covered in English by another letter combination: “aught” (e.g. caught, fraught, taught, …thaught…?). If we’re keeping “ogh” around, we might as well give it a unique pronunciation association to avoid the overlap that was the original problem with “ough”.

            Finally, a single “f” for “tough” could work (certainly, there are examples) but we miss out on employing the Germanic linguistic tendency to indicate a short vowel sound with a double consonant, inherited by words such as “ball”, “fall”, “doll”, “call”, or “puff” (of course, there’s plenty of exceptions (“get”, “bet”, “mat”, etc.) but, so long as we’re making changes, firming up an existing rule (and avoiding the brief uncertainty of whether or not the reader is dealing with a prefix) would, arguably, be useful).

    • @[email protected]
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      133 months ago

      “I love to read, I read an interesting book yesterday”

      Seriously, who came up with this shit 😭

      • KSP Atlas
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        3 months ago

        Clearly, the solution is to make your own writing system for English and then have noone use it so it just looks like weird gibberish to them

        “Y lov tu réd, y red an intarestiŋ buk tüdá.”

      • @[email protected]
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        73 months ago

        Imagine you are reading this aloud, you can’t know how to pronounce the second “read” until you get to “yesterday”. Schrödingers pronunciation.

        • @[email protected]
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          33 months ago

          Actually, you’re right, I didn’t even think about it

          If I wrote “I love to read, I read an interesting book every day”, then the way you say the latter ‘read’ shifts from my original example, and it depends on context that comes later in the sentence

          Wack

  • @[email protected]
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    193 months ago

    Nope, pretty sure French politics should get a crying face (saying this as a French citizen)

  • @[email protected]
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    23 months ago

    You could say I have to take a shit in French and it would sound smooth as hell. -Eddy Murphy.

  • @[email protected]
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    83 months ago

    We did that to stop English from stealing from us. They didn’t get the joke, and here we are.

  • Blackout
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    123 months ago

    American culture is practically a turd in a box with a $99 price tag on it.

  • NONE
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    313 months ago

    As a Spanish speaker, I find it so ironic to see this meme in English…

    • @[email protected]
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      203 months ago

      English might be a bit- creative with the spellings of words but at least they pronounce most of the letters, not just half of them

      • @[email protected]
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        83 months ago

        French does pronounce most of the letters, they just tend to drop the last one. Then there’s our “though” which is often shortened to “tho” with no consequence. English is not creative, either, most of the time the words were actually pronounced in a way that matches and time changed how we spoke them. That and we just kinda lifted the spelling of loan words but said them differently because whichever of our many accents at the time made it otherwise uncomfortable to say.

        • @[email protected]
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          43 months ago

          English needs a major spelling reform, but there’s no way to actually implement one. In order to match spelling to pronunciation, you would be to have a well-defined “high English” pronunciation.

          But any semblance of uniform pronunciation doesn’t even exist within the UK (or even just England), much less across the entire English-speaking world, including places like Canada, Kenya, Nigeria, Australia, New Zealand, India, and many, many more countries.

          And even if you somehow manage to create something (this is basically how “high German” was created, after all), good luck getting all the different governments to adopt the reformed spelling.

          • @[email protected]
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            43 months ago

            also good luck basically upheaving the entire ESL world by making all the texbooks obsolete. would be pretty wild

          • @[email protected]
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            13 months ago

            In French? Yea, it’s there it’s just called, some of the time anyway, an aspirated H. It’s also pretty rare and I’d be willing to bet that that is due to loan words.

      • dream_weasel
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        243 months ago

        But the pronunciations are different word by word. French letter combos make the same sound even if they are not each pronounced the American away, which is nice as a French novice.

      • NONE
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        83 months ago

        most of the letters

        Queue

        (and why the fuck Mike and Nike aren’t pronounced similarly?)
        • partial_accumen
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          113 months ago

          (and why the fuck Mike and Nike aren’t pronounced similarly?)

          Well “Mike” is a typical appreciation of the name Micheal of Hebrew origin that long predates the English language. “Nike” is Ancient Greek, which also predates the English Language. Nike is the name of the Greek god of victory. So neither one of those is English.

            • partial_accumen
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              53 months ago

              Hercules

              An Ancient Roman proper name derived from an Ancient Greek proper name Heracles, which is likely where we get our clues for modern pronunciation.

              molecules

              Thats a French word they built from a Latin base. Take it up with them on that one.

          • NONE
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            3 months ago

            But why is pronounced “Nai-ki” and not “Ni-ke”? We here don’t give a fuck a say “Nike” like Mike.

            • partial_accumen
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              33 months ago

              We here don’t give a fuck a say “Nike” like Mike.

              The single syllable “Nike” pronunciation was introducing in the late 1980s or early 1990s with the advertising campaign for “Nike Air” shoes. Sometimes pop culture name shortening sticks. Another example of this would be the brand Porsche has two syllables, but has been shortened by most to a single syllable name.

        • @[email protected]
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          23 months ago

          A better example might be “home” and “some”, where only one letter is different, but the pronounciation is completely different. There are many words like these. English doesn’t make sense at all.

    • Ricky Rigatoni
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      33 months ago

      English is fucked up in large part due to being corrupted by the French cancer. If anything we are one of the most qualified to talk shit about them.

  • AGuyAcrossTheInternet
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    163 months ago

    At least the Belgian and Swiss Frenches have slightly less weird numbering. Though in France, you get to say “80.” “Leul, blaze it”

    • @[email protected]
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      63 months ago

      We keep the memory alive of a 3000 year old numbering system (apparently some tribes counted in twenties, and that’s the only trace left of it).

  • @[email protected]
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    73 months ago
    • French language: Objectively one of the sexiest on the planet
    • Lemmy shitposter: High probability of clinical brain death
  • SatansMaggotyCumFart
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    223 months ago

    French culture my ass.

    Paris is an overpriced amusement park where all the employee hate you.

    Give me Italy any day.

      • @[email protected]
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        83 months ago

        The Concorde was just loud and cost more money to run, and in 27 years had only one fatal accident wherein a DC-10(American designed) left a piece of debris on the runway which ultimately kicked off the incident. It was a pretty good plane from my understanding.

        If we’re calling out specifics, the Airbus is an incredibly successful plane.