We covered the topic before, but they are indeed in Parisian French.
LOL the Quebecois pronunciation is really weird.
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.
What are some other examples of such spectacular phonological reduction in French? Off the top of my head I can think of īnsula > île [il] and aetātem (with the suffix -āticum: *aetāt(āt)icum) > âge [aʒ] (ëé, without the suffix, is attested in Old French).Lol, yes, such spectacular reducings make you wonder how it's possible.
benedictus / benoît ?Well, not sure how interesting these are, but:
ministerium > métier (5 to 2 syllables, or 3 at most if you want to over-articulate "métier" poetically)
oculum > œil (3 to 1 + rather weird sounds coming out of the blue)
digitum > doigt (3 to 1)
colaphum > coup (3 to 1)
avunculum > oncle (4 to 1 or 2 in very articulate speech)
viridem --> vert (3 to 1)
...