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Is English just badly pronounced French?[1] I wish English would’ve adopted conjugation and other patterns the Romance languages use. I doubt it would’ve fit co

• duped 2y ago
  > Is English just badly pronounced French? Oh totally, my American accent sounds just like, "quand je vais au barbecue le quatre juillet, je vais manger un hot dog avec ketchup." > But it would be better than having 1,000s of badly pronounced French words in the language. They're loanwords that changed over time, they're not "badly" pronounced at all. French is filled with many loanwords as well that are pronounced nothing like their language of origin
• YawningAngel 2y ago
  It's not a conjugation issue. "Champagne" is letter-for-letter identical in both languages, but pronounced differently for phonotactic reasons
  • MarkusWandel 2y ago
    It's a typical French loanword in German too: "Champagner" isn't pronounced with standard German prounciation rules. Even localized ones, e.g. in my childhood a sidewalk was called a "Trottoir" in the French pronunciation. For some reason nobody gets exited about French loanwords.
• jcranmer 2y ago
  > Is English just badly pronounced French? No, English is a Germanic language whose conjugation rules have severely atrophied, with (mostly specialized!) terminology liberally adopted from Latin, Greek, and other roots. In things like tense and aspect structure, I believe that English hews a lot closer to German than French.
  • WalterBright 2y ago
    English is a barbarian language with French nouns, as a result of the Norman conquest of England. Amusingly, using the French words is a signal to being upper class. Such as "purchase" (pourchacier) instead of "buy" (byan).
    • int_19h 2y ago
      Or stuff like "cow" (from Old English) vs "beef" (from Old French). Which kinda makes sense when you consider who grew meet vs who ate it. It's a pretty common thing worldwide, though. French played a similar role as upper class marker in many other countries that were influenced by it when France was at the peak of its global dominance. For Slavic languages, German also played this role at one point, and IIRC there is something similar historically with Chinese in areas in its cultural dominance.
    • crucialfelix 2y ago
      Cutlery (fr), silverware (de) I was taught that this is because the Normans pushed the Germanics out and up north. French dominated the royal court.
    • neaden 2y ago
      All non-Greek languages are barbarian, since apparently it sounds like we are saying barbarbar to the ancient Greeks.
      • AStonesThrow 2y ago
        Imagine how those Greeks resented scribes trying to separate words and phrases with spaces on precious vellum! Those crazy Masoretic Jews trying to pollute sacred texts with vowels... You're just supposed to know them! Punctuation was probably introduced by leaky quills dripping until someone put a positive spin on it. What twist of fate gave us ampersands? Lets keep Ye Olde English pure! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Modern_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Modern_English
  • MarkusWandel 2y ago
• SJC_Hacker 2y ago
  English is a Germanic language with a Latin alphabet, as spoken by Celts, after being ruled by people from France who were originally from Norway (or maybe Denmark)
• eleveriven 2y ago
  While English certainly has thousands of words that came from French, it is far from being a "badly pronounced" version of French.
• vineyardmike 2y ago
  0. The book you linked to is a joke. 1. You can’t take things language related from France at face value - they probably have a bias. They have a strong cultural pride and protection over their language. They also have a strong history of political agendas pushing their language as the “international” language. I say this as a non-French speaker of the French language, and I mean no disrespect to the French people. It’s just a cultural element formed over hundreds of years of government policy. 2. The origins of English is not French, but there are many words in English derived from French. But today they’re English words, with a French history. There are many more words that are not French in origin, so it’s quite disingenuous to call English an “incorrect” or “mispronounced” French. Why is it not an “evolved” or “improved” French? (See point 1). 3. English is conjugated, it’s just different than French. “I am, you are, he is”. “I look, you look, he looks”. Or more obviously “I jump, I jumped, I am jumping”. Most of the French-origin words are also probably not verbs but nouns. That said, I have no data to back that up.
  • wil421 2y ago
    My whole comment was a joke. Whoosh. Lots of replies, I should’ve put /s.