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If you want to feel better about British willingness to butcher French too (ignoring the huge chunk of older loanwords from French - e.g. most -ion words and -m
by vidarh 3y ago
If you want to feel better about British willingness to butcher French too (ignoring the huge chunk of older loanwords from French - e.g. most -ion words and -ment words, maby other large groups), look up the English village of Beaulieu (named by French monks, so it's the French "beau lieu"), and how the English pronounce it.
It was maddening to me when visiting the place.
But as Alexandre Dumas reputedly said, English is just badly pronounced French (ok, so that is an exaggeration; and I cant be bothered to check if that statement is apocryphal or not)
- b112 3y agoGo to youtube and see how NewFoundLand in Canada is pronounced. People just want a single word. It cracks me up that the Foundland wasn't good enough (some place in the UK), so off they went to find New!
- Tagbert 3y agoThat would make French just badly pronounced Latin. And that Latin was just a puffed up corruption of Proto-Indo-European. Of course, language history is just turtles all the way down. All languages change as we speak them.
- usrusr 3y ago> English is just badly pronounced French At least it got me (barely) passing marks in French lessons at my German school: to write French, I would set up the sentence in my head in English, shake it around violently until all the words not sufficiently French-sounding where replaced with roughly synonymous words that did and then improvised accents and conjugation. Unfortunately that cheat is terribly useless in real life.
- Bayart 3y agoIt's not as butchered as you think. Some of it is simply older (Norman-)French pronunciation fossilized in English. It's similar to how you can find Middle Chinese across Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese or Proto-Germanic in Finnish.
- secondcoming 3y agoNorman French is still used in the House of Commons sometimes: https://youtu.be/xBcR-s8QtoQ?si=hm8sHgRZUQ_A5dNy&t=6 https://youtu.be/xBcR-s8QtoQ?si=hm8sHgRZUQ_A5dNy&t=6