• Pyr@lemmy.ca
    62·
    3 hours ago

    French: Every living thing is born without meaning, but non-living things have a gender

  • pedz@lemmy.ca
    18·
    5 hours ago

    And when the letters are removed, French still lets you know there was a letter at some point by putting a little hat on top of the preceding letter. It makes learning it even funnier.

    Forêt and forest. Arrêt and arrest. Hôpital and hospital.

    As a native French speaker this may be the laziest part to me. We still say someone was hoSpitalisé, in a hôpital. People can be défeneStrés through fenêtres. Someone can be arrêté through arreStation.

    Lots of hidden pains and treasures. When I was a kid I thought learning all this shit was pointless. We should just reform everything and spell like we speak. But then I also learned to appreciate the evolution of the language, and why it’s aisle and isle in English.

    • Gutek8134@lemmy.world
      5·
      3 hours ago

      We should just reform everything and spell like we speak.

      Let me introduce you to slavic languages, where AFAIK it’s the rule, not exception

      • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
        3·
        2 hours ago

        Same for Estonian, which is why we need umlauts for letters that don’t exist in many other languages’ versions of the latin alphabet. But since we’re special snowflakes, we also have õ, which is such an uncommon letter in the world that we have a border sign on our biggest island to signify where the language border exists: On the mainland and most places we use õ, but people on Saaremaa people will use ö instead because they’re behind the times.

        We also have ž and š but they’re a bit less special, many european languages use them. Because how would you even know how to pronounce gelatine without writing it as želatiin?

    • some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world
      2·
      3 hours ago

      I’m curious where the ‘s’ was dropped first, in speech or writing? Written French is quite prescriptive with phonetics so I would guess it dropped from spoken language first? (And each little ‘hat’ is just a ‘tip of the hat’ to the lost letter? (Ok, I’ll see myself out lol))

      • pedz@lemmy.ca
        1·
        1 hour ago

        Indeed. According to a literary website from Lyon’s library, the s was not pronounced in certain words well before we stopped writing them. Apparently it took a few centuries to introduce the circumflex.

        Bien que la graphie ait longtemps gardé la présence de ce /s/, on ne le prononçait plus depuis bien avant qu’on ne décide, au XVIIIe siècle (dès l’édition de 1740 du Dictionnaire de l’Académie française), de noter cet amuïssement par le recours systématique à l’accent circonflexe. L’amuïssement du /s/ en position appuyante date pourtant d’après 1066.

        Or in English

        Although the spelling retained the /s/ for a long time, it had ceased to be pronounced well before the decision was made in the 18th century (starting with the 1740 edition of the Dictionary of the French Academy) to systematically indicate this elision through the use of the circumflex accent. The elision of the /s/ in stressed position, however, dates back to after 1066.

        That would be very typical of French. Spoken French is well in advance on the written form. Hence the jokes at its expense.

        Maybe in a few other centuries we’ll have made a few other reforms to match what’s written with what we’re saying, but I think most of us kind of like that. The written form is the glue that holds all the varieties of French together and writing formal French also makes one feel a bit smug.

  • AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space
    45·
    9 hours ago

    French pronunciation works by geological principles: over the years, what looks like an intricate arrangement of vowels and consonants gets eroded and folded down to what’s essentially a nuanced grunt.

  • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
    41·
    5 hours ago

    Letters still have lots of meaning in French. I love French spelling and pronunciation. Not understanding something doesn’t make it meaningless.