To be fair, this also goes for Middle English and Modern English. Take the word knight, in MidE it would be how you spell it, but in ModE it would be something like "nait"
@@mattybrunolucaszeneresalas9072What? No it didn't. It was pronounced /knixt/ (maybe with a long /i/ at some point) in Middle English. The /k/ sound didn't disappear untill the late 17th century (so Early Modern English, not Middle English), in fact, it was the /x/ (or /ç/ depending on the dialect and time) sound that disappeared first in most dialects
So basically French used to be pronounced like someone who doesn't know anything about French would pronounce it. They must have made it more complicated to keep it a secret from everybody! 😂
@@starknight103 Pasques Liselotte. La controverse orthographique au 17e siècle. In: Mots, n°28, septembre 1991. Orthographe et société, sous la direction de Nina Catach, Luce Petitjean et Maurice Tournier. pp. 19-34. I’m sorry, don’t have one in English on hand, but you should be able to use any numbers of translators to get the gist
I think thats because they had more spelling reforms to keep the language updated plus modern Italian is based on the Tuscan dialect, which is said to have conserved more features from Latin than others, like Sicilian for example.
@@marcellomancini6646 Italian was adopted as an everyday written language long after French and English were. In medieval central Italy, literacy meant the ability to read and write Latin (and perhaps Greek if one was really learned)-that is, until influential writers like Dante and Petrarca wrote in a somewhat artificial version of il dialetto fiorentino and made it prestigious. Use of this vernacular was further bolstered by the regional political influence that Tuscany enjoyed from the early Renaissance on, but it wasn't (at least not in the modern sense) a national language until 1861. By then the written form of the language was fairly stable. I think there was a final orthographic reform in the early 20th century.
@@viitorulatrecut Oh thanks for sharing, I didn't know about these reforms cause they don't seem to be pretty big but of course in our schools we aren't taught how Dante and Bocaccio pronounced it
@@viitorulatrecutSardinian is far closer to Latin and very different from Tuscan. Also in Classical Latin the 'G' is always a hard 'G' like in the word 'gas'.
0:33 You are right in that Old French "del" did evolve into "du", but it was not a partitive and it was not used with uncountable nouns back then. Like in most European languages and unlike modern French, the article was omitted in Old French when a noun was uncountable. So, it was sometimes impossible to determine if a sentence or clause had partitive meaning or not: "Roses avrez." - You will have (some) roses. "Pain ne mangerai." - I will not eat (any) bread. As you can see, OF also had pro-drop and the word order was quite flexible as it was an inflected language. With the object clearly indicated by the oblique case, a 12th century French speaker might have said "Lait boivent." "De" by itself did have partitive force, and was used whenever a collective whole was implied: "De nostre lait boivent li paisan." (The peasants drink some of our milk). However, "del" was a contraction of de + the demonstrative, hence it also had demonstrative force (like the modern form "du" still does in French, whenever it translates to "of the") and it would have been illogical to use it with uncountable nouns. It wasn't until the 14th century that it became a partitive and started being used with uncountable nouns.
The irony is that said institution could try (or could have tried in the past) to modernize French spelling, while that was never really a feasible option for English. They just didn't.
Is that the same institution that had a panic attack when young people were suddenly saying "email" in English because French didn't have a reasonably shorthand alternative popularized?
bro, I made a conlang in middle school and kinda kept using (in private notes, to talk to myself, it expanded to my dreams/fantasies (and I took some of it from my dreams tbh, it's a kinda back-and-fourth; I have schizoid personality disorder, so my fantasy worlds get INTENSE)) and expanding it to this day, the first note of its existence is from 2011 (but I likely played around in lost notebooks as early as 2009-2010, generally the period before 2012 is considered a "proto form") and around 2016 it achieved some maturity i.e. it wasn't just random words I stole from the languages I was learning at the time or just random syllables I made it that kept shifting meaning, tied together with a very loose grammar, by then it had a solid set of set-in-stone words, proper phonetics and grammar (pre-2012 is the "proto form", 2012-2016 is the first version, very much a nooblang, 2016+ is, let's say, the "early modern" form) - I can read my notes from that time and understand the recordings, albeit with some mental pain anyway, the point is, the language has existed for 8~12 (14 if we're very loose with definitions) years and I'm the sole native speaker (unless imaginary friends and dream entities count, lol), and by this point, there's a clear difference between the written and the spoken form and, although it obviously started as a fully phonetic language (with the major orthographic reform in 2016), by now I pronounce some words the "colloquial" way (and the "standard" form feels weird to use) but I write them down according to the way I pronounced them a few years ago, because I got used to the spellings and spelling them out as they're said feels very sloppy and weird (unless it's meant to be all chill and homely, or to make it rhyme in poetry - it's insane how much I get from a silly conlang started in middle school, but you probably need to be schizoid or something related to get it, lol) - long story short, I definitely get how natural languages end up this way, I've been running this little rapid-evolution experiment in my head and it works exactly the same (being the only native speaker helps a lot with rapid evolution) to give one example: a common noun ending is -ya (if it's from Latin -ia, or Semitic -(i)yā (I speak Hebrew), idk), you can just slap the bad boy onto any verb to get a gerund / verbal noun (mā = make -> māya = creation) or an adjective (they're also kinda verbs, won't bother you with all my silly grammar, look up how Japanese -i adjectives work for a vague idea) to make it into a noun (bā = beautiful -> bāya = beauty) originally the stress was always on the last syllable, no matter what, but you get used to these verbal forms and there's also vowel reduction (and preserving the stem matters way more than preserving the suffix), so many of these little suffixes became reduced and unstressed, moving stress to the penultimate syllable in most nouns, that includes the ending -ya which shifted to -sə or even -s in spoken speech (-y- changing to -s- could be from Italian, idk, it also helps to avoid forming diphthongs cos *māy could end up as *mē easily) so, for example, "humanity" (a very common word because it's used every time you speak about humans collectively) is spelled "myāmya" but pronounced "myāms(ə)" (spelling out the former is kinda like using "bro" instead of "brother" - know your context; but also that's how you pronounce it even in formal situations by now) there are also cases of ə dropping, forming either a consonant cluster or, usually, vocal l/r (ər -> r, əl -> l), e.g. fōšəl -> fōšl so yeah, I saw these things happen in front of my own eyes, so I totally get it
yay for conlangs! my longest-running one also has gone through a bit of that. besides phonemes changing, like tenuis /t/ and /q~k/ becoming ejectives (before i knew what ejectives are, they just became more and more pronouncedly unaspirate) and /w/ and /r/ turning voiceless, there's also some considerable vowel reduction that is not reflected in spelling; mostly bc the stress pattern is repeated iambic and that is very regular and so in compounds the stressed and unstressed position may undergo a switcheroo: ‹oril› "piece, element" being more or less [ɦ̩ˈr̥iʎ] in isolation, but something like ‹wil'oril› "a hand/finger-element, an individual finger" is [ʍʎ̩ˈɔr̥ʎ̩] - all of those were originally intended to be pronounced clear and neat. also ‹aizoi› "good, round" going from intended [äˌiθɔˈi] to [ɦ̩ˌiθ̞˞w̩ˈi]
@@alexandernoe1619 Well, yes. Because the diaresis is supposed to mean that the vowel must be pronounced. In "aigüe" it is the u that most be pronounced, not the e.
@@Xerxes2005 The diaresis was supposed to separate letters, meaning that -gue can form one single sound, whereas -guë can't (because -gu doesn't, and -guë is -gu + ë). The idea that the diaresis was meant to make a letter audible is a common misunderstanding. It makes sense to use it like that, but the original meaning was just to separate a letter from its surrounding letters.
I mentioned this in another comment on the video itself, but take a look at Louisiana Creole if you want to see how a different French-speaking culture has adapted its spellings.
I dunno while you can't guess the spelling you can at least guess how most words are pronounced and easily see their etymological/derived ties easily (except for some errors they made during a reform). It eliminates a good chunk of homophones too as there's more words that changed to sound the same than to sound different.
When English speakers say that french spelling is really bad are they aware that English spelling is several times worst?. French spelling is weird but is consistent enough unlike English's.
@@DragonTheOneDZAyou're almost right ti isn't equivalent to sh. The whole -tion suffix makes the shun sound as a whole. That's like the one case that's actually pretty consistent.
When French speakers say that English spelling is really bad are they aware that English spelling is the way it is because of the French who invaded and ruled the island for centuries?
English's spelling is bad because English isn't so much one language but rather three+ very different languages in a trench coat! There's no consistency because some words use the French rules while others use the Germanic rules of both the Angles and the Norse. Not to mention some sprinkles of other languages in there for good measure!
Il boivent del lait (pronounced as it is spelled) sounds way closer to the Italian translation "bevono del latte" Today's French sounds like "I(l) bwav dü lè"
This is massively apparent with Punjabi, which only acquired tone sometime since 1500 or so, perhaps much more recently, and is distinct from related Brahmic languages like Hindi in this regard, which still don't use tone in the way that Punjabi does.
@@gi0m298in some cases it gives you clues on how the word will be pronounced in certain contexts. Just as h is not pronounced in french, it does affect how the word sounds in a sentence. In french especially this is quite influential given the liaison system. In irish on the other hand, you have to change how you wrote the word depending on how the words around it sound. Not necessarily bad, but a dofferent approach
You're completely right, other languages do this too, though French is a major culprit still lol. In Dutch, main dialect speakers usually don't say the letter 'n' at the end of a verb, like in 'werken', 'spelen', 'praten'. Instead these words are usually pronounced as 'werkuh', 'speluh', and 'pratuh' because it's easier.
Hindi is good with it's consonants but it deletes vowels and vowels can also change based on their surroundings. Tamil I think is basically perfectly phonetic after you apply some to rules to how consonants are voiced and devoiced. But the reason why some languages are more phonetic than others is because they either don't have as long of a continuous literary history or they underwent relatively recent spelling reforms. As the video says, languages like English and French were once phonetic, but since they had a strong, continuous literary history since like a thousand years ago, spellings become sort set in stone. The old spellings carry more prestige and changing would also make it harder for everyone to read old texts. You can see this in the case of French, changent could be changed to shanj to be more accurate, but few would support that change because it looks weird and because it only actually helps foreign people pronounce French words, because for French speakers, they already know the rules of French spelling so for them the old spelling is still phonetic.
@@FebruaryHas30Days qu is a digraph. It’s pronounced “keh”. Though admittedly, q would be pronounced the same as qu is, so the u is a redundant letter.
@@gillianomotoso328 Indonesian has a digraph "ng", but the "n" and the "g" seem to blend well. Do you think your Spanish "q" can make a sound of its own without copying the other letters? If not, don't consider Spanish as a phonetic language.
All languages' writing systems are at least somewhat behind or isn't perfectly representative. People love to say "Japanese kana are prefect!!!" but it's was only recentishly that they got rid of some (ofc not even all) non-representative characters and combinations (ever noticed how "えう" is so rare? It's because it most instances of it came to be pronounced "よう" and "ょう" *centuries* ago, but they only spelt it how it is now around the 1940s) and just over 100 years ago, there used to be around half-a-dozen ways to write most kana - obviously there's *way* more I'm glossing over but I've said more than enough for now lol. French spelling *will* "catch up", it's just that it being as behind as it is is not particularly bad or strange, and we can let it be for the meantime!
My man! I've always had this same exact doubt since I've started studying french in Duolingo. It always bothered me, how in some exercises you can't phonetically differentiate some verbs in different persons or conjugations. Thanks for the explanation!
Also, because Acadien preserves much of the old pronunciation, the spellings are slightly more phonemic in that dialect. My family, who speak a dialect about halfway between standard Québecois and Acadien, would pronounce as /oɪ~oj/ rather than as /wa/
@rackyourbrains au is absolutely always pronounced /o/ though. The only "weird" thing about eau is the initial e being silent. Though that is absolutely consistent. eau is absolutely always pronounced /o/. Whether that's in seau, peaufiner, agneaux, etc. quite frankly French does need a standalone letter for silent e. It's only because romance languages are so dead-set on keeping A-Z and no adding letters, that we don't have one.
It's also worth noting that, just like English did, during the Renaissance, the French added letters to bring up the Latin etymology of the word. That's why in Modern French, "temps" (time) is written almost identically to Latin "tempus", when in Old French, it was written "tens" (which is where English "tense", as in "verb tense", comes from). As I said, English did the same, as we can see in the word "debt" (which English got from Old French "dete", ultimately coming from Latin "debitum").
I was just about to link the video I made on English spelling, and then I realized I only posted it on TikTok and never on RUclips 😅 so I’ll def post that one soon!! If I still have the vid saved somewhere…
Kan hit be.. Þeyr be wordes and ydiomes lyke "We hoppen alweys" whyche kan meyn "We dance always" as yin þe Tales of Caunterbury And hit biþ more weyr wyþ þe worde 'schuleþ' and 'ritywisnesse', whyche boþe meyn 'Shall' and 'rightfulness?' as yif Modern English. Certanyly hit is hard to please euery men by cause of dyuersity and chauge of langage.
Serious question: Since the sound changes from Middle English to Modern English were systematic, couldn't you (if you don't care about complexity) determine the pronunciation completely consistently by applying the sound changes to the phonetic pronunciation? Example: In "knight", k's were made silent before n's, then instances of the "gh" grapheme were made silent before consonants, like 't', lengthening preceding vowels, which turned into their letter sounds (due to the Great Vowel Shift). Therefore, the pronunciation of "knight" may be determined by the following pronunciation rules: a) k's are silent before n's, otherwise making a /k/ sound, b) "gh" makes the /f/ sound word-finally or before a vowel; otherwise, it's silent, and c) "vowel letters" make the sound of their names before a "gh"
@@Anonymous-df8it I really wish it were like this. Unfortunately there are two problems: 1. Many loanwords simply break these spelling rules. Take the word “genre” which with normal English spelling rules should be pronounced [dʒɛnɚ] but is actually pronounced [ʒɒnɹə]. Some more examples would be ballet, debris, and coup. 2. Because English was standardized after the invention of the printing press, for a lot of words, spelling was entirely up to the owners of the first printing presses, which caused some spelling inconsistencies. For example “ghost” doesn’t even need an “h”, but the owner of the first printing press had Flemish type setters working for him, and in Flemish they commonly spell [g] as “gh”. There’s plenty of examples of words that just getting a new letter added even if the sound isn’t there. Words like island, doubt, subtle, etc
Alright, even being German, I have to defend the french a little bit. You cannot say that it doesn't make sense. Once you heard some words and looked at their spellings, it became pretty intuitive and honestly, I find French easier to pronounce than Spanish (mostly just due to me having a hard time rolling the r without sounding like I'm trying to imitate a dinosaur or Adolf). The only actual problem that I see with the spelling is that there are a lot of letters that do not necessarily have to do a lot on their own with the end product sound, but once you have these letter configurations memorised, it is rather easy. And as I said already, you just have to look at some words and listen to how they are pronounced and after a couple of words you kinda get the grasp of it already. And at least it is pretty consistent, unlike English. I'm just gonna say: through, though, throughout, tough... The only thing that irritated me a bit at first was that verbs are a bit of their own thing when it comes to how to pronounce them, but once you understand that you cannot quite apply the rules on how to pronounce conjugated verbs to the rest of the language, you should again have no problem at all at guessing what a word should sound like.
He definitely puts an extra schwa on the end, and does the same when pronouncing "lait" later, but other than that, he matches the IPA. It's definitely /ɛ/ that he's saying, not /e/, which is less open.
The spelling is holy in spanish, sometimes even the pronuntiation change to be coherent with the spelling This problem is more notorious with word with J, like Jesús, Juan, José or Jamaica In ALL the entire languages, there are few examples of exceptions, like México (that use the X from latin), Enrique and sonrisa (and its variants) Then, every word, is read how it is spelled, that is why so hard for english speakers to emulate the natives and viceversa
One reason English speakers have a hard time pronouncing Spanish words correctly is that a lot of the sounds in Spanish don’t exist in English. In addition to the obvious like RR, Spanish E and O don’t exist in English, and the common approximations would sound like EI/EY or OU/OW to a Spanish speaker. This is assuming they’re actually trying to speak Spanish and not using a word that was originally Spanish while speaking English, like your examples with J. Also, some letters in Spanish do change pronunciation significantly depending on the surrounding sounds; for example, D is pronounced two different ways in “dedo,” G is pronounced two different ways in “galgo,” and R is pronounced like RR in words like “rio” or “honra.” It does happen way less than in English or French, though
It's more because English is all about the consonants and Spanish is all about the vowels. A lot of English vowels turn into schwas, you can even say a sentence with all vowels as schwas and it can still be understood, but I don't think that's possible at all in Spanish
Written Irish, Danish and Tibetan are also notoriously conversative in keeping letters that historical sound changes have left in the dust. Also, Chinese pictograms might get a bad rap for being difficult to learn, but at least they are (in theory) immune to this problem.
Irish mostly got rid of its silent letters half a century ago. It's a subject of debate as to whether how this was done was necessarily good as it went too far in some spots. The spelling system, however, is essentially the same one as that is Old Irish, albeit with explicit marking of lenition and extra marking of palatalisation.
that's interesting. it does explain a little of how liason works. I thought it was so strange that you would omit a sound, still spell it as if it has that sound... and then in specific contexts include the sound it makes much more sense now I know they used to pronounce all the sounds and some got dropped also, I think the word "comfortable" is relevant. so rarely spelt with an apostrophe
What i find pretty astonishing is that Spanish in general HASN'T changed much since the XIII century. Our spelling is pretty similar to what we have back then. And while spanish dialect DO have very distinct pronunciation, and he have phasef out a lot of vocabulary, the general phonetics of the standard language have changed shockingly little. It is a VERY conservative language
Maybe when they were conquering most of south america they ended up creating some kind of ruleset to teach the natives there spanish and that became what they taught everyone spanish from and then bam linguistic drift is limited
@@andreeacat7071 I mean, yeah, but it is more like a very interesting case of subtle diglossia. Nobody speaks "standard spanish" (Not even people in Spain, since vosotros and it's conjugation is not considered standard spanish) day to day. But we are all able to produce it and understand it. Not a single Spanish speaker would consider it a "separate language". But who knows. Maybe in like a century or two Spanish will be like Arabic, with very very distinct local dialects and a very formal standar language which is pretty distinct from how people actual talk
@@paper2222 Yeah, but then again, the RAE has proven they cannot stop the progress of language. Then can say "Hey, the correct form of the past participle of imprimir is impreso, not imprimido". But then people will just ignore it and keep speaking how they want, to which the RAE would then follow with "Actually, both ways are accepted" They currently don't really regulate the language, but rather describe it. Which is honestly a lot less dictatorial (The RAE has a troubled past) But yeah, having a strong regulatory entity was very fundamental for the language during the XV to XIX century
Oh, Spanish has changed _plenty_ since the 13th century! It's just that the spellings haven't needed to adapt. Linguriosa did a video on the pronunciation of Old Spanish a while back, using El Cid as an example, and it's well worth a watch.
If your making conlangs this is important to remember, when was the most recent writing system reform, all the changes since then will likely not be in line with the way the words are written
They've been saying that they wanted to reform the spelling for 200 years but barely got to it, they only fixed the most archaic everyday inconsistency like clef/clé.
When you read the records of England from the era when they were in Norman French, it’s like Franglais. (You can find this stuff online, Internet Archive has loads of it, so do university sites.)
French spelling is fascinating. I attended a seminar at university on the history of french spelling and orthography. Some of the silent letters still make sense to make the liaison to indicate vowel nasality or the feminine of adjectives.
French spelling was actually modified a lot to reflect pronunciation, letters that were not pronounced and were confusing were removed, and pronunciation was harmonised. If you look into it, combinations of letters in french always make the same sounds, and consonants are not pronounced in very specific cases. It only has different spelling rules that you have to know about.
I love old, middle french and missing they were very euphonics in past and they lost and abandoned this, doesn't makes a logical linguistic sense in hodiern french, that half last and last phonems are silenced, it's weird, its all types of iloolgics alophonies In future i hope that they restorut the euphony again in french in a pratical and logical way❤
In Portuguese we are "constantly" updating our spelling, which is a hard thing to do, since we have two organisations that regulate the language, one in Brazil and other in Portugal. Every time there's a reform, both countries try to agree to the same rules, and this is hard, since both dialects are drifting from one another. Still, we had two reforms in the last century, something English and French and in a dire need.
i speak french and while the spelling is manageable when youre used to it, i honestly just think they should update the spellings because it bugs me 😭 typing anything in french takes so much longer than typing in english, and it could be very streamlined if they updated the writing system to be more similar to spoken french
Also, in old French, water was "ague", which sounds like Spanish "agua" and Latin "aqua", but now, it is "eau". However, it still keeps its she/her pronouns.
There were a ton of words for water in old French (since it was really several different mutually intelligible languages), but “ague” was not one of them. The closest I found was “aigue” from the Berry region, but that was the only one with a G and most didn’t have any consonants. The most popular one I saw was “iaue.”
Old French also had the th sound for a very short while before it disappearing. It's how you get Emperor from Imperator, the t turned into th which then turned into nothing
I did see once that they're trying to change French spelling, so it's more like Spanish, in that every letter is pronounced. It's been a while since I first heard about it, so I don't know if it's still in progress or if they scrapped the idea. As someone who learned French in early 2000, I don't know if I'd like re- learning a different spelling, or not... would be interesting to hear what a native speaker thinks about it.
English and French just never did a spelling reform, while in German the spelling reform made everything non-loanword written how it is pronounced. e.g. double konsonant ck, tt, dt, ss,... means the vowel before it is short (example word: Ratte) while s, k, t, d, ß,... means the vowel before it is long (example word: Rate)!
Really? Have you ever realized that "ough" can be pronounced in 7 or 8 different ways? And how do you know which letters are sounded and which are silent? There's just no way to guess how to pronounce a word that you don't know...
I'm trying to think about the words that have had letters drop from the pronunciation or the word in Finnish. Back in the day it used to be spelt with c and w etc because the first dude to write it didn't realize they're useless when there's k, s and v. But can't remember from the top of my head words that got noticeably simpler, expressions did get simpler and some words used changed altogether.
I’ve spoken French since I was a child and I wished we just changed the spelling of words. We have 2 letters that are pronounced “eh” yet we barely use them, opting for letter combinations.
Just a thing - French is a Western Romance language, and as such, like Spanish, Northwest Italian languages and southern dialects of Standard French, back when it pronounced coda position nasals it always pronounced them as velar or coarticulated-velar. That's a big part of why they turned into a nasalisation of the previous vowel.
It is happening to Spanish in Mexico, the s, c, z are pronounced differently in Spain, but in Mexico they have merged into the same ‘s’ sound so you have to memorize which words are written with each letter, there is no way to distinguish them phonetically in Mexico, but that’s a really small change, in the overall Spanish is a phonetic language with a clear to follow orthography, and by sounding out a word you get a 95% accuracy on how it’s written, And even French with all its mute letters and syllables is more logical than English which I think is one of the biggest examples of a language’s pronunciation distancing itself from its written form.
The reason French doesn't update its spelling to match how words are actually pronouns is because the French language is governed by a central authority of stuffy old people who literally call themselves The Immortals
Reminds me of the Polish word for pulp: "miąższ" /mʲjɔ̃w̃ʃ/ while it should be pronounced /mʲjɔ̃w̃ʒˈʃ/. Although pronouncing it the first way doesn't brake my tounge; but also seeing my classmates trying to write it, or just reading Polish literature with all those old and forgotten words and spellings hits different
This is why spelling is supposed to change over time (and why there’s no such thing as “correct” spelling). Some guy thought to standardize English spelling and it’s been a nightmare ever since. Hav a gud dey evrywun :)
This happens in every language. Thanks to the dialectal pronunciation of a Serbian personal pronoun ('one'), I have realised long ago how the word ONE in English had changed from OHNEH to WAN. 😅
As a tamil speaker in germany, i learned the old tamil language just to see how the people might have spoken it 5000 years ago, and the alphabet looked VERY VERY VERY DIFFERENT from the modern, it looks like modern tamazight for some reason
lol its like the way I say ‘can I have’ over time I said it so many times that it evolved from can i have can’ave c’ave which is pronounced smth like kev
English-speaking people have absolutely NO right to make fun of any other spelling system. French spelling, even if a bit counterintuitive, is incredibly more regular than English spelling. At least speaking French you can rest assured that any long, strange combination of mostly silent letters will always be pronounced the same way; an assurance you can never have speaking English. And I say this as someone who wholeheartedly hates France.
Honestly, it depends on the words. Longer groups of silent letters tend to be more consistent but if you take single units, it’s just as inconsistent as English. Granted, we don’t have trough, though, through, etc. but there are odd patterns. My favorite one is “brin” and “brun” (“strand” and “brown”) which can easily sound the same for a non native but there’s a subtle difference. Also, we have suffixes “-é”, “-et”, “-ait”, “-er”, conjugated verbs “ai”, “es”, “est” ([I] have, [you] are, [he/she/it] is), and the coordinator “et” (and) which are all pronounced the same way in France. However, in some parts of Switzerland, some are pronounced differently (which is actually closer to the older pronunciation). Another interesting thing is words containing several e’s between consonants, like “médecin” (doctor). The second “e” is silent, which is consistent everywhere AFAIK. But for a word like “genevois” (one that lives in Geneva), it’s either pronounced “juh-nvwah” or “jnuh-vwah” depending on who you ask (just in case, the “j” is pronounced like “ge” in “garage”). Hopefully you can understand what I mean lmao. Long story short: I think French is just as shitty of a language as English but in different ways.
@@blackfowl75 the words you said that were pronounced differently in Switzerland. How they are pronounced differently than the French counterparts, can you show me them in international phonetic alphabet? I'm a French learner who seeks to have a more classical pronunciation and I want to be able to compare them in detail. Would you help me? I couldn't find any sources that talk about these differences linguistically, so I need some advice.
@@unpiccolocuore Of course! Regarding the verbs etc., the pronunciation depends on the word. "é" tends to be pronounced /e/, while "è" is almost always pronounced /ɛ/. "ai", "et" and "-er" tend to be pronounced /e/ and the others /ɛ/. Regarding "genevois", it can be pronounced /ʒən.vwa/ or /ʒnə.vwa/. If you have more question, I'd be happy to talk about it on Discord or whatever, if you have that. And inferring from your username, buona sera!
@@GerryIsNear you can do whatever you like (I'm neither French nor English). I'm just saying, if someone were to make fun of French spelling, it certainly oughtn't be the English.
Sometimes people insist in not changing how words are spelled simply because of tradition. Think of the letter h, for example. In portuguese it's the only letter of the alphabet without a single phoneme atributed to it. Neither consonant, nor vowel, nor semivowel. It's just there because many latin words used to have an h in them. However when combined with certain letters it can represent consonants. Lh represents ʎ and nh represents ŋ. Ph used to represent /f/ (voiceless labiodental fricative) just like the letter f but it only appeared in certain words like pharmacia. Fortunately all Ph were replaced by F.
Modern French spelling does make sense: there's a simple set of rules and conventions which allows you to pronounce up to 90% of French vocabulary if they are correctly followed. Rien de plus, rien de moins. Anyone could pronounce a new word from the first try. English spelling, on the other hand, is a completely random nightmare of hypercorrections and etymological nonsense. The entire concept of spelling bees is quite idiotic.
With german it's the same...for example in medieval german you pronounced words like e.g. "stein" (stone) as you see it (like the english word "stain"). Nowadays you pronounce it smth like this ("Schtain"). Every word with "ei" nowadays is pronounced as "ai" which is probably a little confusing for learners. Same with words such as "Wetter" (weather) where the final syllable is pronounced as "ar" (in medieval german "weather" was written as "wetar", makes a lot more sense). It's really interesting to see these differences (but still I can't understand why most things were made harder instead of easier 😅)
Neither does English. Well, at least French reading is quite preductable: oi is wa, eau is o. While in English ea alone has at least three readings and all are purely conventinal. Read: can rhyme with reed and red, so can lead. Great rhymes with rate. And people say French is confusing!
Old French for "beau" was "bel"- but like the Southern English, "el" became "ew". If this had been an English word, the Cockneys would have started pronouncing it "beww"- as in "Bow Bewws"- and this would have spread up the Thames and round the nearby coasts. However, this sound in French was instead spelled "beau" to reflect the later pronunciation of "bew" or "beww".
2 notes. 1, french is still somewhat extreme-- it's had more significant phonological change than any other Romance language during the same time frame, for no real reason other than 'that just happens with languages sometimes'. 2, if we're being fully accurate (that is, pedantic) here, *most* languages don't have a spelling system in the first place, because the overwhelming majority of modern languages have either never been written down by their speakers, or have only been written down within the past 50 years.
There's nothing I find more hilarious than an English speaker making fun of French spelling, when 80% of French spelling is very systematic, with only 20% exceptions - meanwhile English is more like 20% exceptions again but 80% is full chaos, no rules, no system. There's an old joke in linguistics: How do read out "ghoti" in English? Yep, you guessed it: it's "fish" - 'gh' in 'rough', 'o' in 'women', and 'ti' in 'fiction'.
@@HandyMan125 tolot, I believe (t from picture, olo from colonel, t from picture). these kinds of spellings are fun but they are quite misleading when taken out of context.
A variation of this comment is made every time this topic comes up, and as needs to be pointed out every time: individual English speakers are not personally responsible for English orthography, so I have no idea how you can think English having worse spelling than French and English speakers criticizing French spelling are in any way in contradiction.
I don't really like the ghoti joke because it just doesnt really work Like what word starts with gh and makes a f sound I get it, but i think english has a bit more form than some think I do think it could be alot better though
As someone familiar with French and French spelling/phonics, when I first came across Louisiana Creole, I could understand about 90% of it when spoken, but their massively simplified spellings constantly made me double-take. For example, "aujourd'hui" becomes "ojoddi". Makes perfect sense, just not something I'm at all used to.
I'm mesmerized not only by the amout of recearch you've done, but also by the fact how beautiful you are (forgive me my fanboy-ing). Thank you for entertaining all the language nerds out there and I wish the best for you and your channel
I’m somewhat aware of the simplification of languages, but I wonder how languages arose with such complex sounds in the first place. (Sorry if this isn’t the right framework for this question
To be fair, this also goes for Middle English and Modern English. Take the word knight, in MidE it would be how you spell it, but in ModE it would be something like "nait"
If you read it out with German, Frysian, or Dutch pronunciation, it still works too. It means 'helper', which makes sense imo.
gh would make a velar fricative, which doesn't exist in most dialects anymore, but otherwise yea
No. Middle English pronounced it nehht
@@mattybrunolucaszeneresalas9072What? No it didn't. It was pronounced /knixt/ (maybe with a long /i/ at some point) in Middle English. The /k/ sound didn't disappear untill the late 17th century (so Early Modern English, not Middle English), in fact, it was the /x/ (or /ç/ depending on the dialect and time) sound that disappeared first in most dialects
@@speedyx3493 what?? No. It wasn’t until the late 14th or 15th century that the K disappeared ! I know this for a fact!
as a french learner i always forget to not pronounce -ent for plural verbs, so it's interesting to see that it used to be pronounced!
If you look at latin verb conjugation, you'll notice the endings are pretty similar. The -nt was already there and used to be pronounced accordingly.
Ne t'inquiète pas, as you keep learning, you will get used to the pronounciation. Bonne chance !
why are you here?
I've literally pronounced it that way for 2 years, and it's hard to change that 😭😭
Yeah, but thankfully it's always that way (another French learner)
So basically French used to be pronounced like someone who doesn't know anything about French would pronounce it. They must have made it more complicated to keep it a secret from everybody! 😂
Ok, can we talk about English spelling now ?😊
That’s actually exactly what happened 💀.
Yeah that’s not a joke, it was never respelled on purpose to keep women and lower classes from reading
@@tigaliyt do you have any sources to back that up.
@@starknight103 Pasques Liselotte. La controverse orthographique au 17e siècle. In: Mots, n°28, septembre 1991. Orthographe et société, sous la direction de Nina Catach, Luce Petitjean et Maurice Tournier. pp. 19-34.
I’m sorry, don’t have one in English on hand, but you should be able to use any numbers of translators to get the gist
It's weird cause Italian is still pronounced phonetically the same way it was in the 1300s
I think thats because they had more spelling reforms to keep the language updated plus modern Italian is based on the Tuscan dialect, which is said to have conserved more features from Latin than others, like Sicilian for example.
@@viitorulatrecut what spelling reforms are you talking about?
@@marcellomancini6646 Italian was adopted as an everyday written language long after French and English were. In medieval central Italy, literacy meant the ability to read and write Latin (and perhaps Greek if one was really learned)-that is, until influential writers like Dante and Petrarca wrote in a somewhat artificial version of il dialetto fiorentino and made it prestigious. Use of this vernacular was further bolstered by the regional political influence that Tuscany enjoyed from the early Renaissance on, but it wasn't (at least not in the modern sense) a national language until 1861. By then the written form of the language was fairly stable. I think there was a final orthographic reform in the early 20th century.
@@viitorulatrecut Oh thanks for sharing, I didn't know about these reforms cause they don't seem to be pretty big but of course in our schools we aren't taught how Dante and Bocaccio pronounced it
@@viitorulatrecutSardinian is far closer to Latin and very different from Tuscan. Also in Classical Latin the 'G' is always a hard 'G' like in the word 'gas'.
0:33 You are right in that Old French "del" did evolve into "du", but it was not a partitive and it was not used with uncountable nouns back then. Like in most European languages and unlike modern French, the article was omitted in Old French when a noun was uncountable. So, it was sometimes impossible to determine if a sentence or clause had partitive meaning or not:
"Roses avrez." - You will have (some) roses.
"Pain ne mangerai." - I will not eat (any) bread.
As you can see, OF also had pro-drop and the word order was quite flexible as it was an inflected language. With the object clearly indicated by the oblique case, a 12th century French speaker might have said "Lait boivent."
"De" by itself did have partitive force, and was used whenever a collective whole was implied: "De nostre lait boivent li paisan." (The peasants drink some of our milk).
However, "del" was a contraction of de + the demonstrative, hence it also had demonstrative force (like the modern form "du" still does in French, whenever it translates to "of the") and it would have been illogical to use it with uncountable nouns. It wasn't until the 14th century that it became a partitive and started being used with uncountable nouns.
Thank you for this very interesting comment!
English spelling is like French spelling if there wasn't an entire institution telling its speakers how to "properly" spell things
The irony is that said institution could try (or could have tried in the past) to modernize French spelling, while that was never really a feasible option for English. They just didn't.
Is that the same institution that had a panic attack when young people were suddenly saying "email" in English because French didn't have a reasonably shorthand alternative popularized?
bro, I made a conlang in middle school and kinda kept using (in private notes, to talk to myself, it expanded to my dreams/fantasies (and I took some of it from my dreams tbh, it's a kinda back-and-fourth; I have schizoid personality disorder, so my fantasy worlds get INTENSE)) and expanding it to this day, the first note of its existence is from 2011 (but I likely played around in lost notebooks as early as 2009-2010, generally the period before 2012 is considered a "proto form") and around 2016 it achieved some maturity i.e. it wasn't just random words I stole from the languages I was learning at the time or just random syllables I made it that kept shifting meaning, tied together with a very loose grammar, by then it had a solid set of set-in-stone words, proper phonetics and grammar (pre-2012 is the "proto form", 2012-2016 is the first version, very much a nooblang, 2016+ is, let's say, the "early modern" form) - I can read my notes from that time and understand the recordings, albeit with some mental pain
anyway, the point is, the language has existed for 8~12 (14 if we're very loose with definitions) years and I'm the sole native speaker (unless imaginary friends and dream entities count, lol), and by this point, there's a clear difference between the written and the spoken form and, although it obviously started as a fully phonetic language (with the major orthographic reform in 2016), by now I pronounce some words the "colloquial" way (and the "standard" form feels weird to use) but I write them down according to the way I pronounced them a few years ago, because I got used to the spellings and spelling them out as they're said feels very sloppy and weird (unless it's meant to be all chill and homely, or to make it rhyme in poetry - it's insane how much I get from a silly conlang started in middle school, but you probably need to be schizoid or something related to get it, lol) - long story short, I definitely get how natural languages end up this way, I've been running this little rapid-evolution experiment in my head and it works exactly the same (being the only native speaker helps a lot with rapid evolution)
to give one example: a common noun ending is -ya (if it's from Latin -ia, or Semitic -(i)yā (I speak Hebrew), idk), you can just slap the bad boy onto any verb to get a gerund / verbal noun (mā = make -> māya = creation) or an adjective (they're also kinda verbs, won't bother you with all my silly grammar, look up how Japanese -i adjectives work for a vague idea) to make it into a noun (bā = beautiful -> bāya = beauty)
originally the stress was always on the last syllable, no matter what, but you get used to these verbal forms and there's also vowel reduction (and preserving the stem matters way more than preserving the suffix), so many of these little suffixes became reduced and unstressed, moving stress to the penultimate syllable in most nouns, that includes the ending -ya which shifted to -sə or even -s in spoken speech (-y- changing to -s- could be from Italian, idk, it also helps to avoid forming diphthongs cos *māy could end up as *mē easily)
so, for example, "humanity" (a very common word because it's used every time you speak about humans collectively) is spelled "myāmya" but pronounced "myāms(ə)" (spelling out the former is kinda like using "bro" instead of "brother" - know your context; but also that's how you pronounce it even in formal situations by now)
there are also cases of ə dropping, forming either a consonant cluster or, usually, vocal l/r (ər -> r, əl -> l), e.g. fōšəl -> fōšl
so yeah, I saw these things happen in front of my own eyes, so I totally get it
This is so interesting 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
yay for conlangs!
my longest-running one also has gone through a bit of that. besides phonemes changing, like tenuis /t/ and /q~k/ becoming ejectives (before i knew what ejectives are, they just became more and more pronouncedly unaspirate) and /w/ and /r/ turning voiceless, there's also some considerable vowel reduction that is not reflected in spelling; mostly bc the stress pattern is repeated iambic and that is very regular and so in compounds the stressed and unstressed position may undergo a switcheroo:
‹oril› "piece, element" being more or less [ɦ̩ˈr̥iʎ] in isolation, but something like ‹wil'oril› "a hand/finger-element, an individual finger" is [ʍʎ̩ˈɔr̥ʎ̩] - all of those were originally intended to be pronounced clear and neat. also ‹aizoi› "good, round" going from intended [äˌiθɔˈi] to [ɦ̩ˌiθ̞˞w̩ˈi]
Technically you're not a native speaker as it's not your first language
It is very impressive to be able to keep track of a language only you speak! All I have to say is btavo 👏👏👏
I’m bookmarking this using a reply; someone remind me to continue reading this lol
As a french person, who is also a french teacher, I approve of changing the spelling.
Well, changing aigu -> aiguë to aigüe was not *that* much of an improvement 😂
@@alexandernoe1619 Well, yes. Because the diaresis is supposed to mean that the vowel must be pronounced. In "aigüe" it is the u that most be pronounced, not the e.
@@Xerxes2005 The diaresis was supposed to separate letters, meaning that -gue can form one single sound, whereas -guë can't (because -gu doesn't, and -guë is -gu + ë). The idea that the diaresis was meant to make a letter audible is a common misunderstanding. It makes sense to use it like that, but the original meaning was just to separate a letter from its surrounding letters.
I mentioned this in another comment on the video itself, but take a look at Louisiana Creole if you want to see how a different French-speaking culture has adapted its spellings.
I dunno while you can't guess the spelling you can at least guess how most words are pronounced and easily see their etymological/derived ties easily (except for some errors they made during a reform). It eliminates a good chunk of homophones too as there's more words that changed to sound the same than to sound different.
Pov: its 3099 and "oo oo aa aa" is spelled as "anticonstitutionnellement"
im dying
@@someguy9133 you would be dead actually
mmm, monke
l'antidisétablissementarianisme
-> l' antdementnism
> Anticonstitutionellement
> Antconstussunelment
> Anconssunelment
> Ancsunelment
> Ancsnement
> Csnement
> Snement
> Nement
> Ment
> M
When English speakers say that french spelling is really bad are they aware that English spelling is several times worst?. French spelling is weird but is consistent enough unlike English's.
You can spell fish as ghoti
Gh=f in
Cough. Tough
O=i in
Women
Ti=sh in
Literally every word that ends with tion
@@DragonTheOneDZAyou're almost right ti isn't equivalent to sh. The whole -tion suffix makes the shun sound as a whole. That's like the one case that's actually pretty consistent.
Tion sound comes from french. In fact like 99.9% words than end with tion is a french word and they are spelled the same and mean the same thing
When French speakers say that English spelling is really bad are they aware that English spelling is the way it is because of the French who invaded and ruled the island for centuries?
English's spelling is bad because English isn't so much one language but rather three+ very different languages in a trench coat! There's no consistency because some words use the French rules while others use the Germanic rules of both the Angles and the Norse. Not to mention some sprinkles of other languages in there for good measure!
Il boivent del lait (pronounced as it is spelled) sounds way closer to the Italian translation "bevono del latte"
Today's French sounds like "I(l) bwav dü lè"
Let's make French make sense.
#BringBackMiddleFrench
0:33 Are there more people who hear /lajtja/ instead of /lajt/?
He kept enunciating as he was coming off that palatalised alveolar 😅 in his defence, it's not an easy sound to make in final position!
@@TheWanderingNighthe also said beauwə
Well at some point in the history of french it was probably lajtj with i glide and palatalized t
I mean the whole “easier” thing is ironically how tonal languages got their tones in the first place.
This is massively apparent with Punjabi, which only acquired tone sometime since 1500 or so, perhaps much more recently, and is distinct from related Brahmic languages like Hindi in this regard, which still don't use tone in the way that Punjabi does.
The archaic spellings don't suck. They give valuable information about how languages were spoken in the past.
English and French spelling does.
And who cares about that besides linguists?
@@gi0m298 exactly. Spelling reforms are a much needed thing
in most slavic languages the spelling was changed and they're phonetic now. nobody cares about archaic spellings
@@gi0m298in some cases it gives you clues on how the word will be pronounced in certain contexts. Just as h is not pronounced in french, it does affect how the word sounds in a sentence. In french especially this is quite influential given the liaison system.
In irish on the other hand, you have to change how you wrote the word depending on how the words around it sound. Not necessarily bad, but a dofferent approach
You're completely right, other languages do this too, though French is a major culprit still lol.
In Dutch, main dialect speakers usually don't say the letter 'n' at the end of a verb, like in 'werken', 'spelen', 'praten'. Instead these words are usually pronounced as 'werkuh', 'speluh', and 'pratuh' because it's easier.
And then we have phonetic languages, like Hindi, Tamil and Indonesian.
Hindi is good with it's consonants but it deletes vowels and vowels can also change based on their surroundings. Tamil I think is basically perfectly phonetic after you apply some to rules to how consonants are voiced and devoiced. But the reason why some languages are more phonetic than others is because they either don't have as long of a continuous literary history or they underwent relatively recent spelling reforms. As the video says, languages like English and French were once phonetic, but since they had a strong, continuous literary history since like a thousand years ago, spellings become sort set in stone. The old spellings carry more prestige and changing would also make it harder for everyone to read old texts. You can see this in the case of French, changent could be changed to shanj to be more accurate, but few would support that change because it looks weird and because it only actually helps foreign people pronounce French words, because for French speakers, they already know the rules of French spelling so for them the old spelling is still phonetic.
Spanish y’all!
@@gillianomotoso328 Do you pronounce the "q", "u", "e" in "que"? Is it pronounced as if it were written "قوي" in Arabic?
@@FebruaryHas30Days qu is a digraph. It’s pronounced “keh”. Though admittedly, q would be pronounced the same as qu is, so the u is a redundant letter.
@@gillianomotoso328 Indonesian has a digraph "ng", but the "n" and the "g" seem to blend well. Do you think your Spanish "q" can make a sound of its own without copying the other letters? If not, don't consider Spanish as a phonetic language.
"Simplifying the pronunciation doesn't make the French people particularly lazy"
Ok, who else just didn't bother with changing the spelling again?
The English...
I mean just off the bat I can think of Japanese pronouncing “desu” as “des” or Malay/Indonesian pronouncing “selalu” as “slalu”
@@cutefidgetythe Japanese's hiragana is still pretty damn close to being completely phonetic
@@cutefidgetyThe vowels in Japanese are still pronounced they're just not always voiced
All languages' writing systems are at least somewhat behind or isn't perfectly representative. People love to say "Japanese kana are prefect!!!" but it's was only recentishly that they got rid of some (ofc not even all) non-representative characters and combinations (ever noticed how "えう" is so rare? It's because it most instances of it came to be pronounced "よう" and "ょう" *centuries* ago, but they only spelt it how it is now around the 1940s) and just over 100 years ago, there used to be around half-a-dozen ways to write most kana - obviously there's *way* more I'm glossing over but I've said more than enough for now lol. French spelling *will* "catch up", it's just that it being as behind as it is is not particularly bad or strange, and we can let it be for the meantime!
My man! I've always had this same exact doubt since I've started studying french in Duolingo.
It always bothered me, how in some exercises you can't phonetically differentiate some verbs in different persons or conjugations.
Thanks for the explanation!
Also, because Acadien preserves much of the old pronunciation, the spellings are slightly more phonemic in that dialect. My family, who speak a dialect about halfway between standard Québecois and Acadien, would pronounce as /oɪ~oj/ rather than as /wa/
nah, still not convinced that it is a good change, look at what they did to my boi eggs!
oof
Eœufs
eurfs
@rackyourbrains au is absolutely always pronounced /o/ though. The only "weird" thing about eau is the initial e being silent. Though that is absolutely consistent. eau is absolutely always pronounced /o/. Whether that's in seau, peaufiner, agneaux, etc.
quite frankly French does need a standalone letter for silent e. It's only because romance languages are so dead-set on keeping A-Z and no adding letters, that we don't have one.
@vpansfagain it's the same silent e problem
In English “naa mean?” is the shortened form of “do you know what I mean?”
[do you] na (know) a (what I) mean?
It's also worth noting that, just like English did, during the Renaissance, the French added letters to bring up the Latin etymology of the word. That's why in Modern French, "temps" (time) is written almost identically to Latin "tempus", when in Old French, it was written "tens" (which is where English "tense", as in "verb tense", comes from). As I said, English did the same, as we can see in the word "debt" (which English got from Old French "dete", ultimately coming from Latin "debitum").
I speak French Natively, and this videos makes so much sense! Learning other languages made me more confused about my own language 😆
Honestly english's historical spelling might be worse
I was just about to link the video I made on English spelling, and then I realized I only posted it on TikTok and never on RUclips 😅 so I’ll def post that one soon!! If I still have the vid saved somewhere…
@@humantenelevenI think you did post it. Is it the "why is English spelling so weird" video?
Kan hit be..
Þeyr be wordes and ydiomes lyke "We hoppen alweys" whyche kan meyn "We dance always" as yin þe Tales of Caunterbury
And hit biþ more weyr wyþ þe worde 'schuleþ' and 'ritywisnesse', whyche boþe meyn 'Shall' and 'rightfulness?' as yif Modern English.
Certanyly hit is hard to please euery men by cause of dyuersity and chauge of langage.
Serious question: Since the sound changes from Middle English to Modern English were systematic, couldn't you (if you don't care about complexity) determine the pronunciation completely consistently by applying the sound changes to the phonetic pronunciation?
Example: In "knight", k's were made silent before n's, then instances of the "gh" grapheme were made silent before consonants, like 't', lengthening preceding vowels, which turned into their letter sounds (due to the Great Vowel Shift). Therefore, the pronunciation of "knight" may be determined by the following pronunciation rules: a) k's are silent before n's, otherwise making a /k/ sound, b) "gh" makes the /f/ sound word-finally or before a vowel; otherwise, it's silent, and c) "vowel letters" make the sound of their names before a "gh"
@@Anonymous-df8it I really wish it were like this. Unfortunately there are two problems:
1. Many loanwords simply break these spelling rules. Take the word “genre” which with normal English spelling rules should be pronounced [dʒɛnɚ] but is actually pronounced [ʒɒnɹə]. Some more examples would be ballet, debris, and coup.
2. Because English was standardized after the invention of the printing press, for a lot of words, spelling was entirely up to the owners of the first printing presses, which caused some spelling inconsistencies. For example “ghost” doesn’t even need an “h”, but the owner of the first printing press had Flemish type setters working for him, and in Flemish they commonly spell [g] as “gh”. There’s plenty of examples of words that just getting a new letter added even if the sound isn’t there. Words like island, doubt, subtle, etc
Alright, even being German, I have to defend the french a little bit.
You cannot say that it doesn't make sense. Once you heard some words and looked at their spellings, it became pretty intuitive and honestly, I find French easier to pronounce than Spanish (mostly just due to me having a hard time rolling the r without sounding like I'm trying to imitate a dinosaur or Adolf). The only actual problem that I see with the spelling is that there are a lot of letters that do not necessarily have to do a lot on their own with the end product sound, but once you have these letter configurations memorised, it is rather easy. And as I said already, you just have to look at some words and listen to how they are pronounced and after a couple of words you kinda get the grasp of it already. And at least it is pretty consistent, unlike English. I'm just gonna say: through, though, throughout, tough... The only thing that irritated me a bit at first was that verbs are a bit of their own thing when it comes to how to pronounce them, but once you understand that you cannot quite apply the rules on how to pronounce conjugated verbs to the rest of the language, you should again have no problem at all at guessing what a word should sound like.
0:20 this is so petty on my end but he literally sounds like he’s saying /be.awə/ instead of just /bɛ̯aw/
He definitely puts an extra schwa on the end, and does the same when pronouncing "lait" later, but other than that, he matches the IPA. It's definitely /ɛ/ that he's saying, not /e/, which is less open.
The spelling is holy in spanish, sometimes even the pronuntiation change to be coherent with the spelling
This problem is more notorious with word with J, like Jesús, Juan, José or Jamaica
In ALL the entire languages, there are few examples of exceptions, like México (that use the X from latin), Enrique and sonrisa (and its variants)
Then, every word, is read how it is spelled, that is why so hard for english speakers to emulate the natives and viceversa
One reason English speakers have a hard time pronouncing Spanish words correctly is that a lot of the sounds in Spanish don’t exist in English. In addition to the obvious like RR, Spanish E and O don’t exist in English, and the common approximations would sound like EI/EY or OU/OW to a Spanish speaker. This is assuming they’re actually trying to speak Spanish and not using a word that was originally Spanish while speaking English, like your examples with J.
Also, some letters in Spanish do change pronunciation significantly depending on the surrounding sounds; for example, D is pronounced two different ways in “dedo,” G is pronounced two different ways in “galgo,” and R is pronounced like RR in words like “rio” or “honra.” It does happen way less than in English or French, though
It's more because English is all about the consonants and Spanish is all about the vowels. A lot of English vowels turn into schwas, you can even say a sentence with all vowels as schwas and it can still be understood, but I don't think that's possible at all in Spanish
Written Irish, Danish and Tibetan are also notoriously conversative in keeping letters that historical sound changes have left in the dust. Also, Chinese pictograms might get a bad rap for being difficult to learn, but at least they are (in theory) immune to this problem.
Irish mostly got rid of its silent letters half a century ago. It's a subject of debate as to whether how this was done was necessarily good as it went too far in some spots. The spelling system, however, is essentially the same one as that is Old Irish, albeit with explicit marking of lenition and extra marking of palatalisation.
that's interesting. it does explain a little of how liason works.
I thought it was so strange that you would omit a sound, still spell it as if it has that sound... and then in specific contexts include the sound
it makes much more sense now I know they used to pronounce all the sounds and some got dropped
also, I think the word "comfortable" is relevant. so rarely spelt with an apostrophe
What i find pretty astonishing is that Spanish in general HASN'T changed much since the XIII century. Our spelling is pretty similar to what we have back then. And while spanish dialect DO have very distinct pronunciation, and he have phasef out a lot of vocabulary, the general phonetics of the standard language have changed shockingly little. It is a VERY conservative language
Maybe when they were conquering most of south america they ended up creating some kind of ruleset to teach the natives there spanish and that became what they taught everyone spanish from and then bam linguistic drift is limited
@@andreeacat7071 I mean, yeah, but it is more like a very interesting case of subtle diglossia. Nobody speaks "standard spanish" (Not even people in Spain, since vosotros and it's conjugation is not considered standard spanish) day to day. But we are all able to produce it and understand it. Not a single Spanish speaker would consider it a "separate language". But who knows. Maybe in like a century or two Spanish will be like Arabic, with very very distinct local dialects and a very formal standar language which is pretty distinct from how people actual talk
also the rae happened
@@paper2222 Yeah, but then again, the RAE has proven they cannot stop the progress of language. Then can say "Hey, the correct form of the past participle of imprimir is impreso, not imprimido". But then people will just ignore it and keep speaking how they want, to which the RAE would then follow with "Actually, both ways are accepted"
They currently don't really regulate the language, but rather describe it. Which is honestly a lot less dictatorial (The RAE has a troubled past)
But yeah, having a strong regulatory entity was very fundamental for the language during the XV to XIX century
Oh, Spanish has changed _plenty_ since the 13th century! It's just that the spellings haven't needed to adapt. Linguriosa did a video on the pronunciation of Old Spanish a while back, using El Cid as an example, and it's well worth a watch.
If your making conlangs this is important to remember, when was the most recent writing system reform, all the changes since then will likely not be in line with the way the words are written
Old french sounds like old italian
They've been saying that they wanted to reform the spelling for 200 years but barely got to it, they only fixed the most archaic everyday inconsistency like clef/clé.
When you read the records of England from the era when they were in Norman French, it’s like Franglais. (You can find this stuff online, Internet Archive has loads of it, so do university sites.)
The title and the intro was simply hilarious in my opinion hahaha
French spelling is fascinating. I attended a seminar at university on the history of french spelling and orthography. Some of the silent letters still make sense to make the liaison to indicate vowel nasality or the feminine of adjectives.
Babe, wake up. New human1011 video just dropped
Just woke up, perfect.
Swedish, Gaelic and Faroese also have some chaotic spellings, English and French aren't the only ones
French spelling was actually modified a lot to reflect pronunciation, letters that were not pronounced and were confusing were removed, and pronunciation was harmonised. If you look into it, combinations of letters in french always make the same sounds, and consonants are not pronounced in very specific cases. It only has different spelling rules that you have to know about.
Old French pronunciation, especially in the milk sentence, sounds much closer to Spanish and Italian 😃
Some "silent letters" were deliberately added by the scribes for etymology..the same with english.
I love old, middle french and missing they were very euphonics in past and they lost and abandoned this, doesn't makes a logical linguistic sense in hodiern french, that half last and last phonems are silenced, it's weird, its all types of iloolgics alophonies
In future i hope that they restorut the euphony again in french in a pratical and logical way❤
In Portuguese we are "constantly" updating our spelling, which is a hard thing to do, since we have two organisations that regulate the language, one in Brazil and other in Portugal. Every time there's a reform, both countries try to agree to the same rules, and this is hard, since both dialects are drifting from one another.
Still, we had two reforms in the last century, something English and French and in a dire need.
So basically French is Australia cranked up to 11 with slurring and vowel reduction.
Same happened to English. They kept the old spelling but the pronunciation changed dramatically.
i speak french and while the spelling is manageable when youre used to it, i honestly just think they should update the spellings because it bugs me 😭 typing anything in french takes so much longer than typing in english, and it could be very streamlined if they updated the writing system to be more similar to spoken french
It still does make sense, you just have to squint your eyes a little
Also, in old French, water was "ague", which sounds like Spanish "agua" and Latin "aqua", but now, it is "eau". However, it still keeps its she/her pronouns.
There were a ton of words for water in old French (since it was really several different mutually intelligible languages), but “ague” was not one of them. The closest I found was “aigue” from the Berry region, but that was the only one with a G and most didn’t have any consonants. The most popular one I saw was “iaue.”
It's just that pronunciation changes but those in charge of orthography rules are traditionalists.
So like how we don't say "kuh-nife" anymore for "knife."
English be out here with “forecastle”
Old French also had the th sound for a very short while before it disappearing. It's how you get Emperor from Imperator, the t turned into th which then turned into nothing
I did see once that they're trying to change French spelling, so it's more like Spanish, in that every letter is pronounced. It's been a while since I first heard about it, so I don't know if it's still in progress or if they scrapped the idea. As someone who learned French in early 2000, I don't know if I'd like re- learning a different spelling, or not... would be interesting to hear what a native speaker thinks about it.
Are you telling me that French use to sound like Portuguese?
Fun fact : to know how we pronounced or wrote a word in old French, our best reference for knowing this will be English.!
this is the law of entropy
English and French just never did a spelling reform, while in German the spelling reform made everything non-loanword written how it is pronounced.
e.g. double konsonant ck, tt, dt, ss,... means the vowel before it is short (example word: Ratte) while s, k, t, d, ß,... means the vowel before it is long (example word: Rate)!
lol the ending about english, kinda true, though we still can often sound out most words I feel
Really? Have you ever realized that "ough" can be pronounced in 7 or 8 different ways? And how do you know which letters are sounded and which are silent? There's just no way to guess how to pronounce a word that you don't know...
"they pronounced every letter" well it might be more accurate to say that every sound they pronounced was written down
I'm trying to think about the words that have had letters drop from the pronunciation or the word in Finnish. Back in the day it used to be spelt with c and w etc because the first dude to write it didn't realize they're useless when there's k, s and v. But can't remember from the top of my head words that got noticeably simpler, expressions did get simpler and some words used changed altogether.
Sounds like french patois
This is also common in Bangla. Some words are written in old Sanskrit but pronounced differently.
This process is always something to keep in mind when you start to hear a lot people saying things "incorrectly", it's not wrong, it's just new
I’ve spoken French since I was a child and I wished we just changed the spelling of words. We have 2 letters that are pronounced “eh” yet we barely use them, opting for letter combinations.
Old french sound definitely italiano, Even speaking it with a higher register makes it similar to Italian
I don't blame French, because English is a trainwreck with its spelling and pronunciation xD
Francophone here, it's not "ils bivent del lait" it's "ils boivent du lait"
… isn’t that what I said 😅
i think they mean "del" vs du" but @doctormystery6264 i think its an old french vs new french word@@humanteneleven
...because it's old french ? It's literally the whole point of the video
Bro you need to watch the video again
Ah yeah del in old French became du. You’ll also notice that the 3rd person masculine plural used to be « il » not « ils »
He made beaw turn into bē-æ-wa
Just a thing - French is a Western Romance language, and as such, like Spanish, Northwest Italian languages and southern dialects of Standard French, back when it pronounced coda position nasals it always pronounced them as velar or coarticulated-velar. That's a big part of why they turned into a nasalisation of the previous vowel.
It is happening to Spanish in Mexico, the s, c, z are pronounced differently in Spain, but in Mexico they have merged into the same ‘s’ sound so you have to memorize which words are written with each letter, there is no way to distinguish them phonetically in Mexico, but that’s a really small change, in the overall Spanish is a phonetic language with a clear to follow orthography, and by sounding out a word you get a 95% accuracy on how it’s written,
And even French with all its mute letters and syllables is more logical than English which I think is one of the biggest examples of a language’s pronunciation distancing itself from its written form.
The reason French doesn't update its spelling to match how words are actually pronouns is because the French language is governed by a central authority of stuffy old people who literally call themselves The Immortals
English did this too with words that start with a silent k. Knock, knife, knee, all used to have a k sound.
see this I can get behind, pronouncing /kn/ at the start of a word sounds like aids
1:02
Him: 'before you say French speakers are Just lazy'
Me:l AM A FRENCH SPEAKER
I Just realized you and etymologynerd are different people
Who copied from who then?
@@aethyr9799 I don't know but I ship them
Reminds me of the Polish word for pulp: "miąższ" /mʲjɔ̃w̃ʃ/ while it should be pronounced /mʲjɔ̃w̃ʒˈʃ/. Although pronouncing it the first way doesn't brake my tounge; but also seeing my classmates trying to write it, or just reading Polish literature with all those old and forgotten words and spellings hits different
A French girl told me this once.
Bro is the new Xiaomanyc
This is why spelling is supposed to change over time (and why there’s no such thing as “correct” spelling). Some guy thought to standardize English spelling and it’s been a nightmare ever since.
Hav a gud dey evrywun :)
This happens in every language. Thanks to the dialectal pronunciation of a Serbian personal pronoun ('one'), I have realised long ago how the word ONE in English had changed from OHNEH to WAN. 😅
If you think French spelling is bad wait til you learn about Tibetan
As a tamil speaker in germany, i learned the old tamil language just to see how the people might have spoken it 5000 years ago, and the alphabet looked VERY VERY VERY DIFFERENT from the modern, it looks like modern tamazight for some reason
lol its like the way I say ‘can I have’ over time I said it so many times that it evolved from
can i have
can’ave
c’ave
which is pronounced smth like kev
English-speaking people have absolutely NO right to make fun of any other spelling system. French spelling, even if a bit counterintuitive, is incredibly more regular than English spelling. At least speaking French you can rest assured that any long, strange combination of mostly silent letters will always be pronounced the same way; an assurance you can never have speaking English.
And I say this as someone who wholeheartedly hates France.
Honestly, it depends on the words. Longer groups of silent letters tend to be more consistent but if you take single units, it’s just as inconsistent as English.
Granted, we don’t have trough, though, through, etc. but there are odd patterns. My favorite one is “brin” and “brun” (“strand” and “brown”) which can easily sound the same for a non native but there’s a subtle difference.
Also, we have suffixes “-é”, “-et”, “-ait”, “-er”, conjugated verbs “ai”, “es”, “est” ([I] have, [you] are, [he/she/it] is), and the coordinator “et” (and) which are all pronounced the same way in France.
However, in some parts of Switzerland, some are pronounced differently (which is actually closer to the older pronunciation).
Another interesting thing is words containing several e’s between consonants, like “médecin” (doctor). The second “e” is silent, which is consistent everywhere AFAIK. But for a word like “genevois” (one that lives in Geneva), it’s either pronounced “juh-nvwah” or “jnuh-vwah” depending on who you ask (just in case, the “j” is pronounced like “ge” in “garage”). Hopefully you can understand what I mean lmao.
Long story short: I think French is just as shitty of a language as English but in different ways.
@@blackfowl75 the words you said that were pronounced differently in Switzerland. How they are pronounced differently than the French counterparts, can you show me them in international phonetic alphabet? I'm a French learner who seeks to have a more classical pronunciation and I want to be able to compare them in detail. Would you help me? I couldn't find any sources that talk about these differences linguistically, so I need some advice.
@@unpiccolocuore Of course! Regarding the verbs etc., the pronunciation depends on the word. "é" tends to be pronounced /e/, while "è" is almost always pronounced /ɛ/. "ai", "et" and "-er" tend to be pronounced /e/ and the others /ɛ/.
Regarding "genevois", it can be pronounced /ʒən.vwa/ or /ʒnə.vwa/.
If you have more question, I'd be happy to talk about it on Discord or whatever, if you have that. And inferring from your username, buona sera!
Okay but can we remark on the oddity of advisory boards like l’Académie française?
@@GerryIsNear you can do whatever you like (I'm neither French nor English). I'm just saying, if someone were to make fun of French spelling, it certainly oughtn't be the English.
I still don't know how they went from aqua to eau. It's like they lost all their teeth to be able to pronounce any consonants.
Isn't there a small sound after the v in boivent? I heard some French people saying a very short sound, like the "eu" sound.
Sometimes people insist in not changing how words are spelled simply because of tradition.
Think of the letter h, for example. In portuguese it's the only letter of the alphabet without a single phoneme atributed to it. Neither consonant, nor vowel, nor semivowel. It's just there because many latin words used to have an h in them.
However when combined with certain letters it can represent consonants. Lh represents ʎ and nh represents ŋ.
Ph used to represent /f/ (voiceless labiodental fricative) just like the letter f but it only appeared in certain words like pharmacia. Fortunately all Ph were replaced by F.
Modern French spelling does make sense: there's a simple set of rules and conventions which allows you to pronounce up to 90% of French vocabulary if they are correctly followed. Rien de plus, rien de moins. Anyone could pronounce a new word from the first try. English spelling, on the other hand, is a completely random nightmare of hypercorrections and etymological nonsense. The entire concept of spelling bees is quite idiotic.
With german it's the same...for example in medieval german you pronounced words like e.g. "stein" (stone) as you see it (like the english word "stain"). Nowadays you pronounce it smth like this ("Schtain"). Every word with "ei" nowadays is pronounced as "ai" which is probably a little confusing for learners. Same with words such as "Wetter" (weather) where the final syllable is pronounced as "ar" (in medieval german "weather" was written as "wetar", makes a lot more sense). It's really interesting to see these differences (but still I can't understand why most things were made harder instead of easier 😅)
France is trying to simplify spelling. The French Academy now allows the spelling Onion instead of Ognion.
Nope
Ognon insted of Oignon
@@ANCalias oh yeah, I thought it looked off. Thanks for rectifying 😁
Neither does English.
Well, at least French reading is quite preductable: oi is wa, eau is o. While in English ea alone has at least three readings and all are purely conventinal. Read: can rhyme with reed and red, so can lead. Great rhymes with rate. And people say French is confusing!
Old French for "beau" was "bel"- but like the Southern English, "el" became "ew". If this had been an English word, the Cockneys would have started pronouncing it "beww"- as in "Bow Bewws"- and this would have spread up the Thames and round the nearby coasts. However, this sound in French was instead spelled "beau" to reflect the later pronunciation of "bew" or "beww".
2 notes. 1, french is still somewhat extreme-- it's had more significant phonological change than any other Romance language during the same time frame, for no real reason other than 'that just happens with languages sometimes'. 2, if we're being fully accurate (that is, pedantic) here, *most* languages don't have a spelling system in the first place, because the overwhelming majority of modern languages have either never been written down by their speakers, or have only been written down within the past 50 years.
There's nothing I find more hilarious than an English speaker making fun of French spelling, when 80% of French spelling is very systematic, with only 20% exceptions - meanwhile English is more like 20% exceptions again but 80% is full chaos, no rules, no system.
There's an old joke in linguistics:
How do read out "ghoti" in English?
Yep, you guessed it: it's "fish" - 'gh' in 'rough', 'o' in 'women', and 'ti' in 'fiction'.
there is one for church too
@@HandyMan125 tolot, I believe (t from picture, olo from colonel, t from picture). these kinds of spellings are fun but they are quite misleading when taken out of context.
@@penguinlim does dgirdg also count? dg in badge, i in birch,
A variation of this comment is made every time this topic comes up, and as needs to be pointed out every time: individual English speakers are not personally responsible for English orthography, so I have no idea how you can think English having worse spelling than French and English speakers criticizing French spelling are in any way in contradiction.
I don't really like the ghoti joke because it just doesnt really work
Like what word starts with gh and makes a f sound
I get it, but i think english has a bit more form than some think
I do think it could be alot better though
As someone familiar with French and French spelling/phonics, when I first came across Louisiana Creole, I could understand about 90% of it when spoken, but their massively simplified spellings constantly made me double-take. For example, "aujourd'hui" becomes "ojoddi". Makes perfect sense, just not something I'm at all used to.
I'm mesmerized not only by the amout of recearch you've done, but also by the fact how beautiful you are (forgive me my fanboy-ing). Thank you for entertaining all the language nerds out there and I wish the best for you and your channel
in german they constantly update spelling to simplify and make it consistent.. french is just extrac
long short is an insane concept lmao why does youtube restrict it to 60 seconds it makes no seeeeense
It's happening to Danish right now.
I’m somewhat aware of the simplification of languages, but I wonder how languages arose with such complex sounds in the first place. (Sorry if this isn’t the right framework for this question