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French culture (lemmy.zip)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
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[–] 19 points 1 year ago (4 children)

English might be a bit- creative with the spellings of words but at least they pronounce most of the letters, not just half of them

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    French does pronounce most of the letters, they just tend to drop the last one. Then there’s our “though” which is often shortened to “tho” with no consequence. English is not creative, either, most of the time the words were actually pronounced in a way that matches and time changed how we spoke them. That and we just kinda lifted the spelling of loan words but said them differently because whichever of our many accents at the time made it otherwise uncomfortable to say.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    English needs a major spelling reform, but there's no way to actually implement one. In order to match spelling to pronunciation, you would be to have a well-defined "high English" pronunciation.

    But any semblance of uniform pronunciation doesn't even exist within the UK (or even just England), much less across the entire English-speaking world, including places like Canada, Kenya, Nigeria, Australia, New Zealand, India, and many, many more countries.

    And even if you somehow manage to create something (this is basically how "high German" was created, after all), good luck getting all the different governments to adopt the reformed spelling.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    most of the letters

    Queue

    (and why the fuck Mike and Nike aren't pronounced similarly?)
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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    (and why the fuck Mike and Nike aren’t pronounced similarly?)

    Well "Mike" is a typical appreciation of the name Micheal of Hebrew origin that long predates the English language. "Nike" is Ancient Greek, which also predates the English Language. Nike is the name of the Greek god of victory. So neither one of those is English.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It's like how you pronounce Hercules and molecules the same way

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    Hercules

    An Ancient Roman proper name derived from an Ancient Greek proper name Heracles, which is likely where we get our clues for modern pronunciation.

    molecules

    Thats a French word they built from a Latin base. Take it up with them on that one.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    But why is pronounced "Nai-ki" and not "Ni-ke"? We here don't give a fuck a say "Nike" like Mike.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    We here don’t give a fuck a say “Nike” like Mike.

    The single syllable "Nike" pronunciation was introducing in the late 1980s or early 1990s with the advertising campaign for "Nike Air" shoes. Sometimes pop culture name shortening sticks. Another example of this would be the brand Porsche has two syllables, but has been shortened by most to a single syllable name.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    A better example might be "home" and "some", where only one letter is different, but the pronounciation is completely different. There are many words like these. English doesn't make sense at all.

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