What movie is it? The guy looks like Aamir Khan to me, but I don't recognize the scene.

What about Normandy?

Oi wah

S Z

Eau O

Sound correct to me.

Letters in words are never pronounced like they sound in the alphabet, they are pronounced in syllables like I am showing you here but you probably already know that and chose not to say it because its not against the French language.

No, the WORDS have a gender because it makes things sound better.

I've spoken French my whole life. The only consistent thing I can think of versus English is the prononciaton of "c" or "g" with the succeeding vowel. Otherwise it's such a mess. "Eau" (water) has three vowels, but is pronounced like the one vowel that is not in it: "o". Almost all words have letters that aren't pronounced, but you can't tell from any rules. You just have to know how the word is pronounced and written.

English pronunciation and spelling is indeed also fairly inconsistent, but I still make a lot less spelling mistakes even though it's not my first language.

The Celtics got invaded by the Romans, then by Saxons, then by Vikings/Danes, then by Normans in the 11 Century. Then they spent the last 900 years invading everybody else.

Okay how the hell did they messed up the pronounce so much??

I learned French in school, but no one ever told me how modern French is a combination of divergent old French languages, "Langues D'oc" in the south where the word for yes was "oc" and "Langues d'oïl" where oui was the word for yes in the North.

From the former, we have L'Occitane, and the Languedoc region of the south of France.

I wonder what else i don't know about French. /me reads Wikipedia.

Everywhere you see 'eau' or 'eaux' it's pronounced 'o'. Always, no exceptions. It's crazy you never noticed that once you know the pronunciation rules of French you can say every word correctly.

I feel like we might as well just go back to symbol languages. What’s the point of an alphabet if the letters don’t actually convey consistent pronunciation? It’s just more confusing because the letters imply rules which don’t hold.

I haven't had my coffee yet this morning. Read this and was like...

"Spanis" 👁👄👁

English suffers from adopting a lot of words from other languages. We got a mix of Germanic, French, a bit of Spanish and Italian, and for the US English, whatever butchery the Brits did/do. (See: The Great vowel shift and Soccer) You smash all those languages together and then let the Brits spend a few hundred years mangling everything and see what you get for rules.

Today English is still willing to file the serial numbers off of any cool sounds and claim as our own. So, Damn the Rules! It makes for interesting words.

But I still blame the French for no other reason than I can.

Oh, we steal words. And we will continue to steal words until we have them all!

I'd put Finnish first. Every letter is there for a purpose and no tricks.

Take it from the Serbs then. They have rule that states write as you say it and that means they even change the spelling of foreign words and such. Foreign names for people and towns are spelled as you would pronounce them. So New York is something like Njujork and Michael Jackson becomes Majkl Džekson or somethig similar.

It's not a rule in Slovene but pretty much any word is spelled the way you would pronounce it.

They do that sometimes in Finnish, less now than before. At least that's what I read on faisbuk.

I'm pretty sure that this is 3 Idiots and that it's the scene where he uses a zipper as an example of a machine.

Ehh, Normans mostly kept to themselves. The folks didn't have to adopt any of their language, except to speak to the king and upper administration. But French language was perceived as fashionable, so the vocabulary crept into English — the division between crude everyday Norse/Germanic words and ‘elegant’ highbrow Norman words is still present in the choice of which ones were chosen to stay in the language for any particular topic.

Sounds like Australian. Or strayn, as I would say to a fellow denizen of this beloved wonderhell.

Meanwhile, Russian is 99% phonetic if you take the total of 5 hours to learn the Cyrillic alphabet (which by the way Duolingo was actually incredible at, just don't use duo for actually learning the language)

I think I'd write oeufs as "uhh" in quasiphonetinglish

French is actually quite regular with fewer exceptions to the rules of pronounciation.

People like to use french words like "Oiseau" (bird) as an example of why french pronounciation is bad but they just do not know the rules of it!

Take "Oiseau" for example "Oi" is usually pronounced [wa] like in "Oie" with a silent e, "Oise" or other words containing it. -seau is a typical suffix. So a french reader can easily know how to pronounce "oiseau" just from reading it. You just can't because you don't know the rules of French pronounciation!

English is so much worse with pronounciations that ignores spelling: Take the word "colonel" for example. What's worse is that in English there seemingly are no rules whatsoever with vocals being long or short depending on historical reasons and consonants appearing or disapering depending on whether Mercury is in retrograde.

French orthography is way more coherent than English. From the spelling you can pretty much tell how a french word is pronounced. Not the other way around, sure, but that's a damn sight better than English which manages neither.

I found it. It's episode 7: the three transformations of Roman Gaul.

He starts to mention Arles at minute 7.

Listening to it again he really struggles with this one, which is weird because I have otherwise no difficulty to understand him when he uses other French or Italian names.

French and English is switched.

It also didn't help that English was standardizing its spelling as the Great Vowel Shift was occurring

As someone who has also spoken French their entire life; I disagree. Is French orthography messy? Sure, but it's a consistent mess. Like the other commenter said, once you know "eau" is pronounced "o", you know. Un beau bateau sur l'eau.

Contrast with English, where rough & thorough thought is required throughout tough sentences such as this one just to figure out what the Fuck sound "gh" will make.

I really came to appreciate the difference in English and French when I used to work in pharmacies; my first job was in a French place, and I intuitively knew how to pronounce drug names at first encounter.

I later worked in a place with only Anglophones and I never got the prononciation on the first try. It was a guessing game.

Les oreilles = laseray

I like the Serbian rule. It's not unnecessarily complicated.

I learned to read Cyrillic from reading Wikipedia. I got obsessed with Russian history and Russian entries in Wikipedia have the English name alongside the Cyrillic spelling. So, I read the Russian words alongside the English spelling to help me how to read in Russian. I also thought I could try reading Greek since Cyrillic is based from it, but for some reason I am struggling. I think I can quickly learn to read letters based from the shape and the sound they represent but Greek letters are a bit more complicated for me.

And guess who they stole a bunch from? Yes, French. Blame the French. Blame the Franks and the Normans specifically for making the pronunciation weird.

I'd have put it at the end.

I never even thought to look at Wikipedia, do you know which Wikipedia entry specifically? I'm curious

There is nothing specific, but what I mean is that Russian public figures or ideas would have their Anglicised name on the entry at the introduction page alongside their Cyrillic spellings. Putting the Cyrillic spelling side by side with the English spelling made me learn how to read and pronounce Russian.

As anything in French, there are exceptions like "femme" et "monsieur" but they are fewer and more manageable than for English.

I still can't read words longer than 10 letters even though I have known it for a few years, Am I stupid?

It's not stupid, it's a limitation you can overcome with practice but only if you actually care enough, not like you absolutely must

I also forgot about the early Dutch press operators that old Bill Caxton hired that gave us the silent h in words like ghost because that was close to ghast. And wh got added because they thought it looked better the the standard hw that was common at the time. Ok, that one is kind of a wash.

The standardization of spelling that printing presses require added a nasty list of silent letters to the English language that weren't there before thanks to those early press operators.