French is worse. I'll never understand how a suffix like -eaux even exists, and essentially melts down to -oh.
And Danish is the absolute master of butchering words when speaking them. Every other Germanic language can read Danish, but none can understand them speaking. English is nothing against that. They have whole families of silent letters
Hvor er H og R i hvordan?
("Where is H and R in the Danish word for how?")
Norwegian borrows a lot from Danish, but at least Norwegian cares more about intonation to separate words, almost sounding like a gallop. "<.<
French
Comparing to Portuguese and Latin, some stuff makes sense, but still kinda of a stretch. Curious, I think, specially as France doesn't have, to my knowledge, as many natural formations as other countries to isolate its people into diverging the language.
Sure you can understand it - it's quite simple, and only requires two sound changes (though the reality of the vowel fusion was probably a bit more complex).
All of the sounds in -eaux used to be pronounced. (Three vowels pronounced together like this (without hiatus) is called a "triphthong", if you're interested.) But, as we famously know from other words in French, final consonants were lost (under specific circumstances), so -x stopped being pronounced as part of that general change.
Also, -eau underwent fusion. The three vowels sounds coalesced into a single sound that preserved parts of all of the three original vowels. The height of the [e] was preserved as a mid vowel, the backness of [a] and [u] were preserved, and the rounding of [u] was preserved, resulting in [o].
Just like English, however, French orthography wasn't updated to account for this change, and so we can see the history of the language in the differences between the way it's written and the way it's pronounced.
13 Comments
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world · 20 pts · 199d
Feh-brew-airy.
Reverendender@sh.itjust.works · 8 pts · 199d
Feb-wu-airy?
Kolanaki@pawb.social · 7 pts · 199d
"My birthday month. The short one."
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de · 4 pts · 198d
May?
squirrel@piefed.kobel.fyi · 2 pts · 199d
Birfday momph
jaybone@lemmy.zip · 6 pts · 199d
birbday
yopyop@sh.itjust.works · 5 pts · 199d
As a fench this is one of the hardest english word to pronounce. Tough.
RickyRigatoni@retrolemmy.com · 2 pts · 198d
Feblueberry
Oka@sopuli.xyz · 2 pts · 199d
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrJv_wUEKko
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org · 3 pts · 199d
French is worse. I'll never understand how a suffix like -eaux even exists, and essentially melts down to -oh.
And Danish is the absolute master of butchering words when speaking them. Every other Germanic language can read Danish, but none can understand them speaking. English is nothing against that. They have whole families of silent letters
lvxferre@mander.xyz · 2 pts · 173d
Auster@thebrainbin.org · 2 pts · 198d
Hvor er H og R i hvordan? ("Where is H and R in the Danish word for how?")
Norwegian borrows a lot from Danish, but at least Norwegian cares more about intonation to separate words, almost sounding like a gallop. "<.<
Comparing to Portuguese and Latin, some stuff makes sense, but still kinda of a stretch. Curious, I think, specially as France doesn't have, to my knowledge, as many natural formations as other countries to isolate its people into diverging the language.
lvxferre@mander.xyz · 1 pts · 173d
hakase@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 198d
Sure you can understand it - it's quite simple, and only requires two sound changes (though the reality of the vowel fusion was probably a bit more complex).
All of the sounds in -eaux used to be pronounced. (Three vowels pronounced together like this (without hiatus) is called a "triphthong", if you're interested.) But, as we famously know from other words in French, final consonants were lost (under specific circumstances), so -x stopped being pronounced as part of that general change.
Also, -eau underwent fusion. The three vowels sounds coalesced into a single sound that preserved parts of all of the three original vowels. The height of the [e] was preserved as a mid vowel, the backness of [a] and [u] were preserved, and the rounding of [u] was preserved, resulting in [o].
Just like English, however, French orthography wasn't updated to account for this change, and so we can see the history of the language in the differences between the way it's written and the way it's pronounced.
goober@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 199d
https://youtu.be/skUfQYr47QQ