Recent searches
Search options
Me: English orthography is the worst. There is no language that has a worse way of writing words that looks nothing like they sound.
French: ...
Me: ...
French: ...
Me: ...
French: "Wingles" is pronounced " [vɛ̃ɡl]"
@peterb Excuse me sir, do you have a few minutes to talk about our lord and saviour Gaelic …?
@cstross Tangent: There's lots to hate about AI ruining the internet, but my fave right now might be the number of AI-generated YouTube "How To Pronounce [x]" pages that confidently provide a completely wrong pronunciation. I can only imagine this is WORSE for Gaelic, because there's fewer people to catch it.
(The top hit for 'How to pronounce Wingles (French)" for example, gets it wrong in a very American-in-Paris way.)
@peterb *Danish enters the chat*
@christianp There's an entire category of American place names whose origin story is that the locals said "Screw it, we're saying this like the most common words we know." Usually but not always applied to French-origin names.
So in near Pittsburgh there are towns called Versailles (pronounced 'ver-SAYLES'), Dubois ("DOO-boys") and Duquesne ("doo-KAYNE").
@peterb that's not too different from English. I live near a small town called Cambois (pronounced "cammus")
@christianp I'm not a linguist or orthographer (orthographist? orthogranaut?) but I wonder how much ludicrous orthography is an artifact of "Hardly anyone was literate, so spellings did not have to be tested in the so-called marketplace of ideas." It's just "One of the sixteen monks in the country who could write chose this spelling in 1218 and no one was around to say 'wait that's nuts.'"
![„How to pronounce any danish word“. A humorous post from Matthias Parchettka for Københavns Sprogcenter. Hints with arrows pointing to parts of an imaginary word:
„Ignore this letter“, „Speak as if you’re drunk“, „this part always sounds like ‚ooell“, „Ignore [also] this part“, „Make some funny mouth shape here“, „Get louder here“, „Say this as fast as possible“, „Swallow your tongue“ and finally „Smile and look confident“.](https://friend.enby-box.de/photo/195205041866ce28b951381044920987-0.jpeg "„How to pronounce any danish word“. A humorous post from Matthias Parchettka for Københavns Sprogcenter. Hints with arrows pointing to parts of an imaginary word:
„Ignore this letter“, „Speak as if you’re drunk“, „this part always sounds like ‚ooell“, „Ignore [also] this part“, „Make some funny mouth shape here“, „Get louder here“, „Say this as fast as possible“, „Swallow your tongue“ and finally „Smile and look confident“.")
@peterb It reminds me a lady who was handing out the Bible in the street. I asked her for her nationality. She answered "German". I guess she imagined that for a French person a German has the same accent as en English person. I told her I already had a Bible; Anxiously she asked me which one. I answered: "the Saint James Version". As a good French person I pronounced : [sɛ̃t]. She corrected : [sint]. I smiled. She was English. It's not nice to lie.
@fl What a story! Why would she lie about that?