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Sometimes "verlan" words come into general use, and then get reversed again. e.g the original french word "femme" (woman) is "meuf" in verlan, but as "meuf" has
by jackhalford 7y ago
Sometimes "verlan" words come into general use, and then get reversed again.
e.g the original french word "femme" (woman) is "meuf" in verlan, but as "meuf" has mecome mainstream some people has started to say "feumeu" which is close to "femme" but pronounced differently.
- misrab 7y agoAs a French educated non-French, I must say: you've gotta love the French <3 :)
- bbx 7y agoAnother widely used one being “arabe” which became “rebeu” and then “beur”. Hence the “black-blanc-beur” generation of the 98 French World Cup.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago> e.g the original french word "femme" (woman) is "meuf" in verlan, but as "meuf" has mecome mainstream some people has started to say "feumeu" which is close to "femme" but pronounced differently. This makes me very curious -- why does the original vowel of "femme" get changed in the first inversion to "meuf"? Why does the inversion of "meuf" have an extra syllable? Is "feumme" not a possible word?
- rendall 7y agoThe article describes this process, but the vowel isn't changed, it's dropped, because it's now at the end of the verlanized word. Eu is added because thats the sound to add when there is no other vowel, as in a one syllable word.
- Peckingjay 7y agoWhile "feumme" is possible I think it would have gotten too close to the original "femme" word pronunciation-wise (which is a very common word itself), which isn't what you want when you're looking for something that differentiates your speech from others.
- yodsanklai 7y agoI think that many people don't even know that "meuf" is verlan for "femme" (or "keuf" for flic). At least, I didn't know when I was a kid. It got engrained in the language and people decided to "verlan"-ize it again. Because "meuf" ends with a consonant, you need to add an extra vowel "eu" to make the process work. You end up with "meufeu" which reverses to "feumeu".
- robocat 7y agoIn English we are really familiar with wildly varying vowel sounds. Is French similar to Spanish? A change in vowel often completely changes the word and makes it incomprehensible. Aside: if your mother tongue is English and you want to speak to a person whose native tongue is Spanish, concentrate very hard on the correct vowel sounds when speaking Spanish. Vowel fluidity is ingrained into English (especially between dialects), but vowel constancy is ingrained into Spanish (even across countries). If you are speaking English words to a Spanish listener, you can help them by speaking the words with transliterated Spanish vowel sounds from the written words. This is especially useful for the names of celebrities or place names e.g. Michael Jackson is said differently in Spanish. Also Sir Francis Drake is literally Pirate Drake in Spanish.
- bestouff 7y agoThere's often a final "e" in French, which is then changed to "eu" after the word gets reversed (and then often truncated). Another example is "herbe" (literally "grass" but now more often used for cannabis) which becomes "beuher" then "beuh"). As the final "e" is often mute, this process is then generalized even to words where it's not there. As a widely used example, a "flic" (slang for a "cop") becomes a "keufli" then a "keuf".
- agumonkey 7y agoThere was a video in the late 90s of a young guy from parisian suburbs talking about how Verlan (the language of his generation) jumped the shark. His quote was something like: > First we started with 'arrete ca' (stop it), > then 'te-arr ac', then one guy's gonna say 'te' .. > surely one day it's gonna be 'et'. > I swear, if someone says 'et' to me, > I'll grab his collar and yell 'ARRETE CA' immediately. I found the rare distance over its own generation priceless.