231–240 of 392 posts
You can speak it pretty “badly” and still be understood fine with a bit of patience.
Speak like Yoda you could and still be understood.
French is a beautiful language but seems to have a harder time dealing beginners mangling its grammar or pronunciation.
(I still really want to learn French though regardless).
But French is even worse. To hell with these non-phonetical languages. I am serious. I'd take Latin over these unpredictable monstrosities any day of the week
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Literary French is quite phonetic, at least outside proper names. What are some examples where you feel that French writing is not in a one to one relation with pronunciation?
Granted, my experience with French is rather limited and the language could be pretty consistent internally. But there's lots of utter madness such as "beacoup" which is literally "buku". Sorry for being blunt but pronouncing 50% of the letters is extremely non phonetical. There's just no other way of putting it
What matters is that a sequence of symbols _consistently_ matches a phoneme. For example, you'll find that the "u" phoneme is often written as "ou" in French. Same thing for the "o" sound and "eau" (you misspelt "beaucoup").
What I would consider "non-phonetic" is the set "though", "through", "thorough", and "thought" in English, where "ough" has four different sounds.
I’d have thought they would have kept English as it’s effectively a neutral language at that point - it would be convenient to avoid accusations of German or French dominance should either push for their’s in English’s place
Are the Irish a joke to you?
But French is even worse. To hell with these non-phonetical languages. I am serious. I'd take Latin over these unpredictable monstrosities any day of the week
Literary French is quite phonetic, at least outside proper names. What are some examples where you feel that French writing is not in a one to one relation with pronunciation?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok so Politico then? https://www.politico.eu/article/in-2022-make-french-language...
This site is hilarious. It says .eu but supposed European news are just UK news. Need I sa more?
The sane thing to do after the Brexit, was to embrace English as main language, since it has not become neutral ground! According to Wikipedia we have: * Germany: 56% English speakers, 14.5% French speakers * Italy: 34% English vs. 19.43% French * Spain: 22% English vs. 11.73% French * Sweden: 89% English vs. 8% French I can't get over how bad this decision is. How can you ignore these kinds of discrepancies? [1] htt…
For Sweden and Germany all (guess >99%) of the french speakers speak english way better then french. The amount of english we're exposed to is so massive and the french is basically non-existent. This is such a useless egoistic move from the french, just accept that english is the lingua franca.
I lived in the Netherlands, worked for an international organization and I still have a lot of friends who works (or worked) in Brussels. Few comments:
1. The level of profentiency in foreign language of people working for the European institutions is orders of magnitude higher than readers of HN. Not too mention translators. It's not rare to meet people speak 6 languages totally fluently. Switching languages for some working documents is almost a non-event beyond signaling. There will be zero impact for the rest of us.
2. I totally support a Europe where people speak foreign languages beyond English.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For Sweden and Germany all (guess >99%) of the french speakers speak english way better then french. The amount of english we're exposed to is so massive and the french is basically non-existent. This is such a useless egoistic move from the french, just accept that english is the lingua franca.
I’m french and most of the content i watch is also in english, made mostly by americans with an american point of views and ways of resolving problems. Sometime in british english with british point of view. I think it’s sad that that you don’t seem to realize that it’s a problem that most of the content we are exposed comes from a single culture. As for the move, it’s totally useless, and if they wanted to be strong…
Using English exposes people to a certain way of thinking that is more linked to a set of cultures or traditions. It's an undeniable fact, both semantics and linguistics teach us that.
But if the aim is to help politicians think from a different perspective, French is a bad choice. If that was the purpose, a reasonable choice would be to opt for languages related to cultures of more practical rationality.. German or Scandinavian languages
Of course it's the French politicians who have the nerve to try impose their language. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that French culture is one of the most pedantic and nationalistic in Europe, to the detriment of the other members.
After getting the middle finger from the UK they are slowly then quickly excising the English out of their lives.
France is sitting on an economy that hasn't net expanded in inflation-adjusted terms since approximately 1980. Forty years of stagnation, you'd think a nation would consider what it's doing wrong. Their position and importance in the world has collapsed over the past half century - and that's only going to get worse yet. It's pretty clear how that middle finger exercise is going to turn out for France. The British at…
interesting. any sources where i could find out more?