The French, whenever you see an English word and none of the letters make sense, we stole it from the French.
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39 people disagree apparently, not counting me. Humour is subjective after all. If anything, forcing your humour to others is even more overdone imo.
whenever you see an English word and none of the letters make sense
that just about describes half the English vocabulary
I recently learned the correct spelling of the word prerogative and I still haven't recovered.
Burrough turned into burrow and borough, both pronounced differently to brow, rough, trough, thought and through.
I hate English.
The funniest about this is that I once watched a video on interesting languages to learn and they were like "this language is super interesting because you spell everything the same as you pronounce it"... yeah like any normal language?
I understand languages get to change over time and once upon a time edinborough was actually pronounced close to it's spelling, not the butchered edinbra of today. But why the fuck hasn't the spelling catch up completely puzzles me, since no other language I've heard of has issues to the same degree.
You leave potatoes out of this. They are literally the food of gods and glorious when fried!
Edit: I grew up on a farm next to a small river in Minnesota called Pomme de Terre. And due the light sandy soil, it was excellent for growing pomme de terres and sugar beets.
Honestly, the original question was a good one. That snarky reply in the original picture was pretty douchey. There's a lot of interesting history behind linguistics.
we stole it from the French
The French invaded England and forced them to adopt their horrific clown language. FTFY.
Actually the Normans, who were Vikings who rocked up in France and caused such a stink that the crown granted them lands in the north to shut them up. 1066 was basically a succession crisis between three cousins vying for the English crown.
That's one of my all time favourite South park episodes.
Getting the local Chinese restauranteur to build the city wall... because the Chinese are good at building walls.
In Viking's defense: of all the Romance languages French is the most like Latin being spoken and written by a drunk hick with no formal education.
I recently saw a tiktok (therefore I'm an expert) that showed that Old French was pronounced pretty much exactly how it was spelled.
Every language simplifies it's pronunciation over time, but usually they alter the spelling when they do, but French just said "miss me with that shit, dog" and decided just to change the rules about pronunciation instead
I mean, I Heard that French monks were paid by the letter scribed, rather than the word, so they just put extra letters into everything using made up rules about spelling.
Probably yes, but the rules are simple enough today that you don't need a PhD to explain though thought, or tie vs tier, or.... wait for it.... live vs live, or record vs record, read vs read.
Consistent and simple aren't the same thing.
That being said, English is neither of those things, so it's a bad comparison to make 🤣
Yeah that was my first thought. French pronunciation is fucking ridiculous, this isn't the epic burn you think it is.
Kuno:
who the fuck decided rendezvous would be pronounced like that
You:
Poor monolinguals. They can't seem to understand that other languages besides English exist
Kuno:
what the fuck did you just call me
Kunoesse:
He called you Mongolian
Really should have censored the M word.
Only a monolingual can call another monolingual “monolingual”.
I know american sign language and english. Am I monolingual?
Wait...how do we count languages? Do programming languages count as a second language?
They say being bilingual is only impressive if your first language is English. Since you are expected to know English anyways. Is it true?
Bilinguals aren't impressive at all. I think most people are bilinguals. Apparently, according to Journal of Neurolinguistics, we have more bilinguals (43 percent of the world population) rather than monolinguals (40 percent).
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There are trilingual regions in my country. And one neighbouring country is mostly trilingual too(2 official languages + 1 foreign)
Well nobody can objectively force something to impress you or not impress you. But most people speak more than one language natively or on a regular basis, hell just short of 2 billion people (1/4 the world's population) alone are from the Indian subcontinent region, and there the high variation/diversity of languages throughout the region make speaking 3-4 languages well the norm.
Similar story with Indonesia/Papua New Guinea. And most people in Central Asia and many European parts of the former USSR speak Russian as a 2nd language (nearly all Kazakhs, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and most Baltic people speak Russian to a high fluency, while also often speaking a 2nd and sometimes 3rd native language).
Then you consider language in European countries like the Netherlands (Dutch/English), Belgium (French/Dutch/English), Sweden (Swedish/English), Finland (Finnish/Swedish), Denmark & Norway (Denmark or Norwegian / some obscure highly derived dialect that's different enough from the standard and common languages to be counted), Spain (Castillian/some other Spanish language), Italy (Standard Italian/some other Italian language). I'd say at least a third of Europeans speak more than one language natively and two thirds can speak more than one language well at all.
Despite being a massive continent, one thing that can be said about almost all of the socities there is that most of them are polylingual. Probably less so in Arabic-speaking majority countries.
Really, monolingualism is only the norm for anglo countries – especially the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand. Not so much in like half of Canada. I think it could be said that monolingualism is the norm in most of China too, but I'm not so sure about that. AFAIK it's pretty mixed in Latin America but overall a majority of the people there speak only Spanish or Portuguese, save for places like Peru & Uruguay.
I met a couple in Vanuatu - one of the world’s most language dense nations - whose mother tongues were mutually unintelligible, so they communicated using the country’s official language, Bislama. A lot of bilingual people don’t speak English. Plenty of Eastern Europeans don’t speak English (unpopular during communist rule) but speak say German or Russian as well as Serbocroatian or whatever.
When someone asks me which languages I speak, I say Italian.
"…and?" "Well, English of course"
"…and?" "…and that's it", I'd admit embarassed.
Among young educated people in most of Europe it is common to speak at least two languages beside your native one.
As long as you speak the language most used in your country and English then you're fine
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Windows, planes, tea, door knobs, underpants. Putin will kill all russians untill all die by any means, even starting war.
Was at the airport in Buenos Aires, English didn't help me. Luckily I had learned a handful of useful phrases in Spanish.
Monolinguals are as culturally diverse as Mongolians. Just staying in one place, no need to expand horizons or learn anything new.
The last time the Mongolians decided to expand their horizons, it didn't work out so well for a decent chunk of the rest of the world. I think it's perfectly fine they choose to keep things simple, tbh.
First Mongolians make the NoSQL database of my nightmares and now this... When will they learn!?
I know some of those words, nice!
edit: added quotes
Ron-Day-Voo
rendezvous /rän′dā-voo͞″, -də-/ noun
- A meeting at a prearranged time and place. synonym: engagement. Similar: engagement
- A prearranged meeting place, especially an assembly point for troops or ships.
- A popular gathering place. "The café is a favorite rendezvous for artists."
monolingual /mŏn″ə-lĭng′gwəl/ adjective
- Using or knowing only one language.
- Using or knowing only one language. Opposite of multilingual. "monolingual speakers; a monolingual dictionary"
- Knowing, or using a single language.
Mongolian is the principal language of the Mongolic language family that originated in the Mongolian Plateau. It is spoken by ethnic Mongols and other closely related Mongolic peoples who are native to modern Mongolia and surrounding parts of East and North Asia. Mongolian is the official language of Mongolia and Inner Mongolia and a recognized language of Xinjiang and Qinghai. The number of speakers across all its dialects may be 6.2 million, including the vast majority of the residents of Mongolia and many of the ethnic Mongol residents of the Inner Mongolia of China. In Mongolia, Khalkha Mongolian is predominant, and is currently written in both Cyrillic and the traditional Mongolian script. In Inner Mongolia, it is dialectally more diverse and written in the traditional Mongolian script. However, Mongols in both countries often use the Latin script for convenience on the Internet.
Mongolia is a landlocked country in East Asia, bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south. The western extremity of Mongolia is only 37 km from Kazakhstan, and this area can resemble a quadripoint when viewed on a map. It covers an area of 1,564,116 square kilometres, with a population of just 3.3 million, making it the world's most sparsely populated sovereign state. Mongolia is the world's largest landlocked country that does not border a closed sea, and much of its area is covered by grassy steppe, with mountains to the north and west and the Gobi Desert to the south. Ulaanbaatar, the capital and largest city, is home to roughly half of the country's population. The territory of modern-day Mongolia has been ruled by various nomadic empires, including the Xiongnu, the Xianbei, the Rouran, the First Turkic Khaganate, the Second Turkic Khaganate, the Uyghur Khaganate and others.
:::And the 'S'. And to be fair, the 'OU' could have just been a 'U'. Also, the 'E' could have been an 'A'.
Randevu.
Randevu
interestingly, thats what the turkish word for rendezvous is.
in turkish, words are written exactly as theyre pronounced at all times.
just a funny sidenote :3
Oh they are so smart, just like I don't know, most countries in the world that don't prefer imperial units and imperial era spelling
(The sarcasm is not directed to turkish though 😁)
In French, words spelled with just "u" use a different sound than those spelled with "ou". "ou" (in la Métropole) is similar to the sound in English "do"/"too"/"sue"/"shoe" etc. while "u" is similar to Standard German long "ü"/"üh" like in "Lüge" but the German one is relatively reduced and isn't quite as frontal/strained/constricted.
I'll grant you the 's' but it's still more or less pronounced like it's spelled. You can replace 'ou' with 'u' but it still sounds right with 'ou'.
English pronunciation in general is fucked up lol. You can never really tell how an 'e' or an 'a' will be voiced 🤣
E should definitely be an A or even an O. Shouldn't really have an E.
Rän-di-vü
TIL the pural for Rendezvous is Rendezvous. You just pronounce the S
Rendezvous isn't even that bad. What really grabs my goat are the pronunciations for colonel and choir.
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