Is that seaux?

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.

French: oui paid for the whole alphabet and by God oui're using the whole alphabet

Oué

Accurate.

œufs.

Without reason, sure, but with a gender

And we are going to use the almost all the alphabet to make exactly one sound.

For instance eaux is pronounced o.

Tibetan: abject chaos

Bordeaux = bordo

I think you actually just described Danish.

Why pronounce a consonant when you just can swallow it and use a glottal stop instead?

Yes it is sceau

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.

I’ve always thought it was funny there is no “o” in “eaux”.

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

That's just called language

> Heard my friend is going to 'Bordo'

> Look up Bordo

> Mfw it's spelled Bordeaux

In English, every letter is silent. Sometimes.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/mums-the-letter-when-letters-dont-say-a-thing

Do you like ghoti sticks? Then you're a gay ghoti.

English pronunciation is much worse than just silent letters. It doesn't really make any sense and you need to learn tons of words by heart: https://fishofgold.net/2023/12/08/english-pronunciation-is-stupid/

Sometimes even the exact same set of letters are pronounced differently. The verb live vs a live broadcast. Read (present) vs read (past) and many more.... Are you kidding me?

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

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))

That's un oeuf

A meme format from one of the greatest movies of all time???

Up down up down up down up down

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

And different words used to name the same thing can have a different gender

I hate French like the next guy, but pronunciation rules are at least consistent compared to English. An English word's pronunciation is everyone's best guess. Sometimes depends on context or tense, even when written the exact same. With French you don't really have that. It's confusing, there are lots of letters, but at least it's consistent.

German: Dogs are male, cats are female, kids are middlesex. Your refrigerator is male.

Gaeilge: awww, you guys are adorable

Un oeuf is enough

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?

"A g å a ø i a å" is a proper sentence where I come from.

It means: A goat on an island in a river.

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.

English pronunciation depends on the language they stole the word from.

There are more than one word that must pronounce badly xd

Couple of years ago I learned Estonian has letters ž and š, and as a Balkan Slav it made me excited (I'm weird) 😂

It also depends who you're talking to and/or where you are.

It's really not, if anything French and English should be reversed. You can generally know how a french word is supposed to be pronounced when reading it (assuming you know how to read French, of course), in English it's a complete crapshoot

Pour mon omelette du fromage

The funniest part of this meme is: English is worse than French.

Stolen from? The English got invaded by the Romans, Normans, Vikings etc. Didn't have much choice in that word adoption.

Dogs are male, cats are female

There's no way to disprove that! Have you ever seen a cat penis?

The French word for bird is oiseau, which contains every vowel and none of them are pronounced correctly.

Where is this and how would you pronounce the "g"?

Also, you made me think about a story about a shop in a southern Norwegian city, where the owner put up a sign around lunch time: "e æ a å eder" (I am off to eat), the shop owner across the street saw it and made his own sign saying "e æ a e å" (I am off as well (lit. I am off I also))

It's North Jutland. The g is pronounced as "ge" almost like German "geh".

I'm not native, and even after 15 years I sometimes still don't understand the local dialect.

The Norwegian Kamelåså joke about Danish is funny because its true.

That part's not as unique to English though.

Yes, I know some of those are technically pronounced differently, but the average English speaker can't tell.

But honestly, as someone who learned French as an adult, the biggest hurdle is knowing which combinations of letters make which sounds. Many are completely illogical - the 3rd person plural verb conjugations are particularly weird - but there is less inconsistentcy than English. The harder part is actually trying to get your English tongue to say words like "aéroport" or "heureux" or "accueillir" properly.

There are always some outliers, like "oeuf" (egg) being pronounced "uhf" while the plural "oeufs" being pronounced "oo", but you get used to those.

What do you mean ? IT IS obviously the only correct way to write o.

I had the reverse problem when listening to the excellent "the fall of Rome" podcast.
At some point, the american host starts to talk extensively about a city port in the South of France named something like "Awol".

I was confused, thinking : "I lived close to the area he is describing for 3 years as a student, and never heard of that city. Maybe it's like in Marseille where the port was re discovered in the 80s inland, many hundred meters from the sea."
After more than an hour of listening I realised he was simply saying "Arles" with an American accent.

It is a very famous Roman city with beautiful ruins where I went several times, so I might just be dumb.