French pronunciation works by geological principles: over the years, what looks like an intricate arrangement of vowels and consonants gets eroded and folded down to what’s essentially a nuanced grunt.
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2026
610 points (97.2% liked)
Memes
16842 readers
371 users here now
Post memes here.
A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.
An Internet meme or meme, is a cultural item that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. The name is by the concept of memes proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1972. Internet memes can take various forms, such as images, videos, GIFs, and various other viral sensations.
- Wait at least 2 months before reposting
- No explicitly political content (about political figures, political events, elections and so on), !politicalmemes@lemmy.ca can be better place for that
- Use NSFW marking accordingly
Laittakaa meemejä tänne.
- Odota ainakin 2 kuukautta ennen meemin postaamista uudelleen
- Ei selkeän poliittista sisältöä (poliitikoista, poliittisista tapahtumista, vaaleista jne) parempi paikka esim. !politicalmemes@lemmy.ca
- Merkitse K18-sisältö tarpeen mukaan
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
I think you actually just described Danish.
Why pronounce a consonant when you just can swallow it and use a glottal stop instead?
"A g å a ø i a å" is a proper sentence where I come from.
It means: A goat on an island in a river.
load more comments
(2 replies)
That's just called language
load more comments
(1 replies)
I hate French like the next guy, but pronunciation rules are at least consistent compared to English. An English word's pronunciation is everyone's best guess. Sometimes depends on context or tense, even when written the exact same. With French you don't really have that. It's confusing, there are lots of letters, but at least it's consistent.
English pronunciation depends on the language they stole the word from.
It also depends who you're talking to and/or where you are.
That part's not as unique to English though.
Stolen from? The English got invaded by the Romans, Normans, Vikings etc. Didn't have much choice in that word adoption.
Oh, we steal words. And we will continue to steal words until we have them all!
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.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(5 replies)
English pronunciation is much worse than just silent letters. It doesn't really make any sense and you need to learn tons of words by heart: https://fishofgold.net/2023/12/08/english-pronunciation-is-stupid/
Sometimes even the exact same set of letters are pronounced differently. The verb live vs a live broadcast. Read (present) vs read (past) and many more.... Are you kidding me?
load more comments
(3 replies)
French: oui paid for the whole alphabet and by God oui're using the whole alphabet
And we are going to use the almost all the alphabet to make exactly one sound.
For instance eaux is pronounced o.
> Heard my friend is going to 'Bordo'
> Look up Bordo
> Mfw it's spelled Bordeaux
load more comments
(3 replies)
And when the letters are removed, French still lets you know there was a letter at some point by putting a little hat on top of the preceding letter. It makes learning it even funnier.
Forêt and forest. Arrêt and arrest. Hôpital and hospital.
As a native French speaker this may be the laziest part to me. We still say someone was hoSpitalisé, in a hôpital. People can be défeneStrés through fenêtres. Someone can be arrêté through arreStation.
Lots of hidden pains and treasures. When I was a kid I thought learning all this shit was pointless. We should just reform everything and spell like we speak. But then I also learned to appreciate the evolution of the language, and why it's aisle and isle in English.
We should just reform everything and spell like we speak.
Let me introduce you to slavic languages, where AFAIK it's the rule, not exception
Same for Estonian, which is why we need umlauts for letters that don't exist in many other languages' versions of the latin alphabet. But since we're special snowflakes, we also have õ, which is such an uncommon letter in the world that we have a border sign on our biggest island to signify where the language border exists: On the mainland and most places we use õ, but people on Saaremaa people will use ö instead because they're behind the times.
We also have ž and š but they're a bit less special, many european languages use them. Because how would you even know how to pronounce gelatine without writing it as želatiin?
load more comments
(1 replies)
I'm curious where the 's' was dropped first, in speech or writing? Written French is quite prescriptive with phonetics so I would guess it dropped from spoken language first? (And each little 'hat' is just a 'tip of the hat' to the lost letter? (Ok, I'll see myself out lol))
Indeed. According to a literary website from Lyon's library, the s was not pronounced in certain words well before we stopped writing them. Apparently it took a few centuries to introduce the circumflex.
Bien que la graphie ait longtemps gardé la présence de ce /s/, on ne le prononçait plus depuis bien avant qu'on ne décide, au XVIIIe siècle (dès l'édition de 1740 du Dictionnaire de l'Académie française), de noter cet amuïssement par le recours systématique à l'accent circonflexe. L'amuïssement du /s/ en position appuyante date pourtant d'après 1066.
Or in English
Although the spelling retained the /s/ for a long time, it had ceased to be pronounced well before the decision was made in the 18th century (starting with the 1740 edition of the Dictionary of the French Academy) to systematically indicate this elision through the use of the circumflex accent. The elision of the /s/ in stressed position, however, dates back to after 1066.
That would be very typical of French. Spoken French is well in advance on the written form. Hence the jokes at its expense.
Maybe in a few other centuries we'll have made a few other reforms to match what's written with what we're saying, but I think most of us kind of like that. The written form is the glue that holds all the varieties of French together and writing formal French also makes one feel a bit smug.
Is that seaux?
Yes it is sceau
I haven't had my coffee yet this morning. Read this and was like...
"Spanis" 👁👄👁
Without reason, sure, but with a gender
Assigned with malice
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.
They do that sometimes in Finnish, less now than before. At least that's what I read on faisbuk.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
French: Every living thing is born without meaning, but non-living things have a gender
German: Dogs are male, cats are female, kids are middlesex. Your refrigerator is male.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
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)
load more comments
(4 replies)
French and English is switched.
The funniest part of this meme is: English is worse than French.
Yes, I know some of those are technically pronounced differently, but the average English speaker can't tell.
But honestly, as someone who learned French as an adult, the biggest hurdle is knowing which combinations of letters make which sounds. Many are completely illogical - the 3rd person plural verb conjugations are particularly weird - but there is less inconsistentcy than English. The harder part is actually trying to get your English tongue to say words like "aéroport" or "heureux" or "accueillir" properly.
There are always some outliers, like "oeuf" (egg) being pronounced "uhf" while the plural "oeufs" being pronounced "oo", but you get used to those.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Gaeilge: awww, you guys are adorable
Tibetan: abject chaos
A meme format from one of the greatest movies of all time???
Up down up down up down up down
load more comments
(2 replies)
In English, every letter is silent. Sometimes.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/mums-the-letter-when-letters-dont-say-a-thing
view more: next ›