just reverse some recording in French
From Latin > French: Pertinent Information?
- Thread starter Koprophagos
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Etaoin Shrdlu
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Exhibit A: the month of August. It's a fairly substantial word in Latin, with three syllables, four consonants, two simple vowels and a luxury diphthong to crown it all. It's not difficult to see how augustus could turn into agosto or agost or even gustar; one could imagine any number of other changes, such as the G turning into a Dutch-style voiced guttural, or the S dropping out – S drops out a lot. But it's impossible to imagine that by any natural process francophones would have decided to drop everything from the word and turn it into nothing more than an exclamation. Mind you, they did the same with aqua, but there was less to drop. There are dark forces at work here.
All you need to do is watch Le gendarme de Saint Tropez.
Completely off-topic: I remember one day discovering my grandmother understood French when she translated a phrase from one of the Gendarme films for us even though she couldn't see the film herself (she was mostly blind). The reason why this was unexpected was that, when she grew up, it was hardly common for girls to receive an elaborate education. Later I learned that she was a middle class girl who'd married a working class lad - i.e., my grandfather.
What do you mean?
The character played by Louis de Funes often speaks in an exaggerated manner that many people in the Netherlands, at least, associate with the French language in general.
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Etaoin Shrdlu
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Exhibit B: the myriad of homophones in the forms of the verb (there are sodding homophones everywhere, but let's just do the verbs now). Il parle. Ils parlent. Il est resté. Elle est restée. This eventually reaches the giddy heights of J'ai envoyé les resultats, je les ai envoyés, J'ai envoyé les lettres, je les ai envoyées. This is beyond unnatural. It exists solely so that French people can enjoy the exquisite pleasure of correcting foreigners, and probably each other.
There is also le verre vert (the green glass) and les verres verts (the green glasses)
that does actually sound different though
The ghost of Medieval French lives on to torment the English.
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Etaoin Shrdlu
Guest
It's not just the English. The French hate everyone, mostly.
not in my experience, oddly. maybe it's luck
As I said in another thread, these actually sound slightly different in Belgian French.
Yes, that is utterly illogical.
Sure. Many people get all that wrong. Also, one of the most common mistakes is confusing the past participle and - er infinitives, as they sound the same too.
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Etaoin Shrdlu
Guest
Presumably this was hashed out during negotiations leading up to the formation of Belgium, when the francophones agreed to stop turning numbers above 69 into mental arithmetic exercises, and the Phlegms agreed to moderate their G, which in Dutch results in the liberal sharing of the contents of your throat with your interlocutor.
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Etaoin Shrdlu
Guest
There's not much point in my making the effort to write complete codswallop if people are going to ruin it with pesky facts.
I'm Southern Dutch, so I couldn't resist the urge to reply.
There's also this:
Il a été l'été. It was summer.
Note that in French, été can be a compound past form of "to be" or "summer."
Il a été l'été. It was summer.
Note that in French, été can be a compound past form of "to be" or "summer."
No one would say that. We'd say "c'était l'été".
It was a joke. C'était l'été is more common (and était and été are homophones).
Almost, but not quite: était = /etɛ/; été = /ete/.