French Spelling Isn't That Bad
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- Опубліковано 11 жов 2023
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can't believe i did the thingy wrong i wrote "ils ont" a second time instead of replacing it with "ils écoutent", silly me
Written and created by K Klein
Art by kvd102
Additional writing and editing by @Annatomyy
Music by K Klein
Translations:
Leeuwe van den Heuvel - Dutch
Natheniel Siu - Cantonese
Sicilanguageist - Italian
Le Napolitain - French
#french #linguistics
The thing is: when a French native speaker see a new word in their language for the first time, you can be sure they'll have the right pronunciation on the first try. That is more rarely the case for a native English speaker in the same situation. That makes me think French is actually much more consistent than English.
Consistently bad.
@@PlatinumAltaria Not arguing against that, haha.
Anything is better than English spelling lol
@@bandav_lohengrin
Even than the Tibetan system? Last I check, that is a nightmare within a nightmare.
@@andreimircea2254 That doesn't exist, let me be delusional and pretend Tibetan writing is fake
Being a guy who has spent 9 years learning French, I see that, from my experience, the only way to learn it is by just seeing the rules, expecting them to appear as examples in the next lessons and pray forcibly to God that the teacher would explain them again and again until you learn them all.
Don't worry, French people fuck up their own language all the time. I have also seen people speak perfect French for a decade and still get the gender of a word wrong.
The most important when learning a language is fluency, mistakes are only bad when writing for official or professional documents but there is a lot of tools to help with that
Yeah it’s sort of the same with English, I’ve seen people using the wrong for “you’re”
@@serenegenerally bro I've seen hundreds of times worse. I've seen many people spell "would have/would've" as "would of" and it makes me cringe in pain every time
@@blank4502Irregardless, we could care less. (Sorry)
@@chaotickreg7024 also that. People say "could care less". The expression is "couldn't care less", as in "I care so little about this that it would be impossible for me to care less"
As a Swedish speaker who now speaks both English and French fluently and uses both daily, I can guarantee that French spelling is super regular compared to English 😂
Tack så mycket from a french who made his Erasmus in Sweden!
English is just a a bloat with a bloaty French plugin.
@@hentype I will eat you
och svenska har kanske den sämsta ortografin av de tre språken 😬
I absolutely do not agree. Much easier to make mistakes in French.
In Canadian French, ê and â are useful because they are actually unique sounds. /ɛː/ and /ɑ/ respectively. So words that sound the same in France like patte (paw) and pâte (pasta) are distinct in Canada. There are exceptions but it works most of the time
Oh no. I haven't even considered how in trouble I'm going to be when I start to think about regional dialects and characteristics.
Yes! Why do people forget about non-France French?
"ê" seems a bit useless to me, since you can remplace it easily by "è".
For patte/pâte, the same as you ! I have the same for "ô", I tend to say it longer or "au", instead of an short o. Like the difference between "hotte" and "hôte".
Same in Swiss French I believe
@@eldestmillennial3136You don't have to speak in a specific dialect, just speak in a comprehensible manner and you'll probably be fine
circumflex does make a difference in pronunciation in some dialects.
For example in Quebecois: "bette" is [bɛt] and "bête" is [baɪ̯t]
Question here is if spelling should change based on dialect. This is what languages like English and Serbo-Croatian does, so why not French? --The discussion about the French spelling of onion is a great example. If I've understood it, the new spelling reflects the pronunciation in Paris, but not in all dialects. Therefore the old spelling can be used for the other dialects.--
@@Liggliluff English spelling doesn't change according to dialect. I'm not sure if you're referring to words like neighbor vs neighbour, but if you are, this is less a result of dialects and more a result of certain reforms being adopted in some places and not in others. While the british preferred the original norman spelling of words, used in Samuel Johnson's "A Dictionary of the English Language", while americans use the spellings used by english spelling reformers like Noah Webster in his "An American Dictionary of the English Language". In general, spelling reforms for the english language have rarely been adopted otherwise.
@@Liggliluffthere's two kinds of groups of dialects of French. The first are the ones who started after French spread out all around the world. So Québécois, African, North African, Swiss, etc. Equivalent of Nigerian English, American English, etc. While the second ones are the ones found in mainland France, and who are "traditional dialects", like Champenois, Poitevin, Picard, Gallo, Wallon, etc. They're all each very different from each other. Because in reality they're separate langauges that all evolved from Old French independently as Langues d'oïl. Those would be very different, but those aren't really French per se, and even their spelling would be widely different. I mean yeah, they're called dialects but they're as much different as Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian.
@@Liggliluffif you start changing spelling based on dialect, you're on your way to having a split standard language and eventually a complete linguistic split. I mean, could you imagine the shocking state that would be revealed if we started doing that for English, beyond the tiny spelling differences between American and British English, I mean, and really went all in on phonological accuracy. It may be inevitable, but that doesn't make it any less inconvenient lol
In Newfoundland we do the same in French and English right is not right
As a native French speaker, I want to congratulate you for your quite impressive pronunciation.
as a non native french speaker, i thought he was native
@@selladore4911 It's close to native, but not quite perfect. It's good, but there are tiny little things that give it away.
For example, "ils aiment". We would still pronounce the l, but he doesn't.
@@blackbear0152I think that's because the l is between brackets meaning it's optional.
@@matthewsaints350 Yeah, and being a native speaker, I'm telling you it's not really optional. Usualy, it's optional in informal settings, with friends and familly, but not in anything even slightly formal. And a youtube video about linguistics feels too formal to drop the l completely.
That, and even in an informal setting, I wouldn't drop the l in "ils aiment". Can't explain why, but I would definitely pronounce it.
Nah it's shit
1:10
Boy I hope someone got fired for that blunder
Now in all seriousness, I hate when people say ortography makes no sense. It does make sense, it's just more complicated
i can't fire myself :((
French orthography makes sense, from a linguistical viewpoint as archaisms, both silent h's make sense, which is why les hommes and les haricots doesn't abide by the same rules, because the h's got silent at different times.
I keep getting so distracted by that mistake. He's talking and all I can do is stare at it.
is that a morhafukin mumkey reference
One of my linguistics professors had a fascination with French. If you know the rules, you can read every French sentence without mispronouncing a single word (almost). Which is a far-cry from English which is impossible to sight-read correctly. Heck, it's even more consitent in this regard than German.
In French many exceptions
@@hlibprishchepov322 French is actually much less exception ridden than English. Still a terribly complicated orthography that does have exceptions. But it's tolerable compared to English.
@@hlibprishchepov322 There aren't that many exceptions, it's just that the exceptions have exceptions.
As a German Speaker I would like to fight that last claim. We don't even have silent Letters, thus don't need such rules.
@@nick3805Also as a german, it does have some weird spellings and inconsistencies at some places too tho.
I think French looks wilder on paper to someone who doesn't speak it but once you know the rules it becomes actually really easy to read them most of the time.
While English usually doesn't look that crazy but it doesn't have as many rules to explain its eccentricities when they occur.
Yep I totally agree with that
yeah i could find the pronunciation of the word "contraventionnalisation" in french very easily, but before i learned what the actual pronunciations were i thought "preface" was "pree-fis" (actually "pref-fis") and "primer" was "prime-er" (actually "prim-mer")
Whether you pronounce "primer" as "prigh-mer" or "prim-mer" depends on whether you're referring to paint or books :/ @@notwithouttext
@@stinkeycookie2382 books, sorry for not clarifying.
you totally right. I'm a native french speaker and yeah French is hard to learn at the beginning and it can be discouraging but when you've memorized the rules and all the specificities everything become easier.
French spelling is really no more or less complicated than English orthography. Frankly, I always found it far more consistent and it is much easier to guess how a word is pronounced in French.
From what little I know, pronunciation is okay when you learn all the rules, but spelling is much harder.
I feel like very few exceptions you always know how to pronounce words in French. The same is NOT AT ALL the case in English.
French and english are number 1 and number 2 for objectively worst writing in Europe.
There shouldnt be any guessing, ever.
@@b34m270 Yes, thats why the capitol is called Paris not Pari.
I mean, isn't french kinda the reason English orthography is the way it is?
I'm a French teacher and the thing is that French's weird spelling is actually such a boon to English speakers. If you can figure out from the accents what the historical Old French spelling and pronunciation was, you can make an educated guess as to what the English meaning is - école to escole to school, for example, or coût to coust to cost. As I always say, what's your most important tool in learning French? A good English vocabulary!
....aaand romance languages
Être->estre and suddenly I can understand that it means the same thing as my mothertongue's este (the verb to be)
I’m an American who has learned French, and in my opinion French spelling is much more consistent than that of English. There are a few weird words such as oignon or fils, but at the very least the vowel system is almost entirely regular, unlike English’s. Certain frustrations are the double L, which can just be either Y or L, but aside from that, I know how to pronounce a new word perfectly from seeing it
As for oignon (which according to the 1990 reform, can be also spelt ognon, but I digress), it should be analyzed as o-ign-on, not oi-gn-on. Similarly, it's M-on-t-a-ign-e, not M-on-t-ai-gn-e.
Nous oignons des oignons.
Les fils coupent les fils.
Double L is /j/ after an I in virtually every word except _ville_ (and derivatives) and where it appears at the beginning of words like _illumination,_ where it's a variant of the negative _in-._
@@vytah even if you analyze it like that, that i would be pronounced separately, which is still not the pronunciation. And as for the 1990 reform, (and this is all based off a quick Wikipedia search through so correct me if I’m wrong) I don’t think it was very widely adopted, as I’ve never seen many of the reforms that were suggested
@@AmyThePuddytat there are a few more, such as mille or like the rest of the number words. And funnily enough, that 1990 spelling reform did address a couple of those, like imbécillité. But yes, for the most part ill is fairly regular, but it has just enough irregular words to be infuriating
I speak Portuguese as a first language and English as a second, and I've been learning French for a few months now. French spelling is weird at first, but it is very consistent once you get the hang of the rules, *very* unlike in English. For example, in English you can never know what "ea" is going to sound like. Take "bread", "meat", and "break". All three have different vowel sounds and you have to memorize each one! At least in French "eau" always sounds like /o/ (as far as I know).
Hi, Portuguese natives cant really find French that difficult. Although pronunciations differ, as latin origin laguages they share a lot : grammar, vocabulary, syntax are basically the same.
@@lust4bass "basically the same" is quite an understatement...
@@roggeralves94 eu acho que são.... 😊
As a native it's fascinating to learn about words and sound history.
Like the video said about 'ê' it replaced an ancient 'es' who still there inside some variations of the word.
Like forest in French is "Forêt" but something related to the forest is "Forestier". Or "Fête" stands for party and "Festoyer" means "to do a party" (tbh "Festoyer" come from ancient french and is not commonly used nowadays).
Besides, accent on vowels sound different, an easy way to figure which one is used on writing. 'è' and 'é' sound different.
But still some letter assembled still unpredictable sounds like 'e', 'a' and 'u' make same sound than 'o'
or 'a' and 'I' can sound like 'è' or 'é' depending of the word.
For some case it's because some sound slowly merging together century after century. In french it won't be surprising if 'ê' disappears to become a standard 'e' for example.
hé bien voilà, enfin des étrangers capables de réfléchir, ça fait plaisir à lire!
I never thought French spelling was bad. It is certainly better than English. Most of the time when reading French text, you can correctly guess the pronunciation but not vice versa. English however you can't guess the pronunciation when reading texts AND vice versa.
This doesn't mean that French spelling is good. Just that both French and English spelling is bad. People who are native speakers of other languages can see that.
Exactly! I only know 7 languages, but among these English is the one with the worst spelling system, while French is much more helpful for pronounciation (in my opinion at least)
@@gamermapperI sort of agree, but I think when people complain in English about French spelling it's a bit ironic
@@gamermapperHere's what I think. There's a relation between phones and glyphs and inverse relationship from glyphs to phones
French glyphs to phones relation is in my opinion very good I don't think you can look at many french words and not know how to pronounce it. It's almost a function. Even the major violation, "silent letters" at the end of words aren't silent. Complaining that "tons and tond and ton" sound the same doesn't make any sense because they don't always sound the same because of the liaison.
The inverse relation however is one to many (hence not a function) and very confusing sure there are some rules about syntactic function like aient on plural 3rd person verbs but other times you either have to just know the word or know the history of the word. So generally speaking it's hard to hear a word and know how to spell it
English however is just very bad in both directions so it's hilarious to see anglophones mock french spelling.
This coming from someone who learnt both as a second language
@@elisaelisarossYou "only" know 7 languages? Dude, knowing this amount is amazing!
The fact that you were grateful for the French to drop an “s” from “isle”, turning it into “île” is very fun because the word “isle” in English has the exact same silent “s”
The circumflexes are useful if you speak Spanish, because you can just know to add the dropped s back in and magically understand the word.
when i learnt french i found the orthography surprisingly intuitive, I wonder if knowing english orthography helped with learning the french one by knowing not to let our guard down… also knowing about sound shifts between the two languages makes knowing french words that resemble an english equivalent easier to guess the pronunciation off
Same! I still make mistakes very often, but I actually find pronounciation quite intuitive, and although writing from spelling is a lot harder, it can still be done, in my opinion.
I think that about a third of English words comes from French, so that explains some similarities between the languages.
I'm fully convinced that the people who find french spelling nonsensical never actually tried to learn a foreign language. They remember having difficulties at school and that's it.
As a french i'd rather say that french is easy to read but harder to write. To many exceptions.
@@ghyslainabel42% plus 15% latin.
The irony of being told that french spelling sucks in english doesn't escape me.
As a native french speaker, we always joke about how complicated and horrible our language is. But upon reflexion, I actually really love it. And the spelling might be one the things I love most about it. But you have to look at it in the right way; French spelling IS NOT meant to directly represent pronunciation. It's almost kind of a different language, where the idea of phonemes disappears, or fundamentally changes.
Still, it is not hard for someone familiar with french spelling to figure out what a word is pronounce from its orthography; what typically gets talked about as inconsistency or exception or weird phenomena is often just another pattern. These silent letters aren't hidden to trick you, they're everywhere as a fundamental part of the written language.
French spelling is hard to learn, but it's not as hard or complicated in itself as a lot of people think.
yeah, I agree with the pattern thing, for example english speakers will often bring up "eau" containing nearly every vowel besides the one it sounds like, without realizing that wherever you encounter the letter combination "eau", you can always expect it to sound like "o". Which can definitely _not_ be said about English vowels...
@@Orynae yeah english vowels are too easy you just use schwa for everything and that's about it
@@OrynaeWhy not just write å then?
I think that what almost everyone fails to understand here is that french spelling gives a lot of information.
This video is full of grammatical examples, with the unsaid presupposition that written language should be a pure transcription of spoken language... but it isn't. French spelling gives you different information, and additional meaning. Plurality, grammatical gender, etymology, and ironically, it even gives clues on pronunciation in different contexts that you wouldn't necessarily get from listen to a french speaker with a certain accent (difference between "brun" and "brin" for instance). It also helps to distinguish a lot of homophones.
In fact, written french is probably much easier to understand and have a clear conversation with than spoken french, thanks to its spelling.
"rench spelling IS NOT meant to directly represent pronunciation." C'est majoritairement faux. Dans la majorité des cas chaque lettre a une prononciation bien définie. "rien que dans le mot "majorité" par exemple, chaque lettre compte.
Finnish writing system gets often called a "good writing system" based on its consistency and straightforwardness, but we actually have a similar phenomenon to liaison. Many Finnish words that used to end with a consonant, dropped the last consonant and replaced it with a double ending, aka a sound that doubles the following consonant (an adds a glottal stop in case the following letter is a vowel). But this sounds is not written at all and most Finnish speakers do not even recognize its existence. Probably because it is not written and we learn in school that "Finnish writing system is phonetic". However, you can really *hear* the difference, especially with Finnish learners, because in Finnish, sound length is very important, and the lack of pronouncing the double ending (which again, is not written at all) can change the meaning quite a lot.
We do the same in Italian, and learning Finnish I actually make an effort to do it. Also, sorry, why is sydämen, sydämessä, etc. spelt like that???
@@widmawodIf you mean the "m", I don't know, but if you mean the endings, they have a different meaning; sydämessä means in heart, while sydämen means heart's (there are no articles (a/an/the etc.) In Finnish)
@@taikurinhattu193Veikkaan, että tässä pohditutti se, että sydämen, sydämessä jne. kirjoitetaan yhdellä m:llä, vaikka ne lähes aina lausutaan sydämmen, sydämmessä jne :)
And I mean, Finnish writing system has other inconsistencies too, like if you add the particle -pa, if it follows an n, the n turns into m. And the ng-sound is written with n or g if it's short consonant, but with ng if it's a long consonant. The logic is still fairly simple compared to English and French for example, but Finnish has by no means a phonetic writing system :D And don't get me started on ortography of modern loan words...
@@kanskubanskuTry pronouncing a 'n' sound in 'nk' or 'mp' contexts and you notice pronouncing a 'ng' followed by k or 'm' followed by p is much easier. So in the end that spelling change just reflects the sound again, even in the case of Helsinki -> Helsingin; the 'g' just disappears and makes the 'ng' sound longer.
Basic rules of Finnish spelling and pronunciation can be explained within five minutes, and with edge cases like this it is still doable in less than 15 mins. If spelling mutates to reflect a sound mutation, it isn't as bad as figuring out that, in this case, 'n' before 'p' is pronounced 'm' instead or 'nn' is sometimes pronounced like long 'ng'.
I took a French phonetics class in college and it doesn't make it any easier to learn lol, but there's often a reason for the French pronunciations that "don't make sense"
That's literally called "historical spelling", which no sane person should be defending. Inuff is inuff!
@@PlatinumAltariaHistorical spelling makes sense if you need to be able to read old books written even 500 years ago and still understand them. In some cases, it also makes sense because of the specific Latin or Greek based words, in which case it's better to leave a trace to its original etymology.
lol bro have you looked into English phonetics?
If you learn French during childhood( school, not native ), like 7-14, pronounciations comes natural.
@@gamermapperHistorical spellings are sometimes based on a folk etymology rather than the true etymology, so they’re not a good source for etymology
@@EnigmaticLucas most of the time there aren't, but i agree; a spelling reform should get rid of the folk etymologies. so island is iland, sovereign and foreign are soveran and foran, etc. i find it very satisfying when i realize "disease" is "dis-ease" or "manuscript" is "manu-script" or "only" is "one-ly".
French spelling is awesome. I can basically immediately tell the pronunciation of a word (except a few common ones like femme or les) based solely on writing. It just works.
Yeah but French is far from the only language that does that, I'd argue Italian is better even, as in almost every case you can not only tell the pronunciation of a word from the spelling, But also the spelling from the pronunciation, with the only exceptions being in cases where it's necessary to differentiate to homophonous words ("O" vs "Ho" for example), and unfortunately in the case of more recent borrowed words, which often keep the spelling and pronunciation of their origin language rather than being Italified. It's also generally an easier orthography to learn than that of French because it uses more common spelling, for example, pronouncing as /wa/, as it's said in French, is not very common crosslinguistically, whereas pronouncing it like /ɔi/ or /oi/, as it'd be pronounced in Italian, is far more common.
english is part of the minority of languages that doesnt do that
ê/â/ô etc. are still useful (in their own way). they explain why an "s" (sometimes others letters as well, but lets not get into this) appear in derived words:
"hôptial" but " hospitalier"
"forêt" but "forestier" etc
"âme" but "animique" (this one is tricky lol)
The circumflex over "ê" DOES make a difference in pronunciation in some dialects. Like Quebecois French, where it diphthongises or lengthens the vowel, though there are still some exceptions thrown in there for good measure.
French French is terrible enough, why does the world have OTHER FRENCH NATIONS
and then there's ''êtes'', whose accent has no reason for existence
@@pawsindmeinlieblingsfach3518 it does actually have a reason, old french version was "estes"
@@nitroanvilhead5229 But it's pronounced like ètes, not âïtes, even in the Quebec dialect
@@pawsindmeinlieblingsfach3518 There is a distinct pronunciation between Quebecois and French from France for that word. In Canadian French, the ê does make a distinct sound.
This silent letters and circumflex diacritics are tools that help us figure out the origin or etymology of a word, and are often helpful linking them with other languages like Latin or German or Spanish... For example fenêtre = Fenster (german) -> i remember "Fenster" thanks to the circumflex which means there used to be a S after the E in the latin word. Or for instance you can tell that "forestier" is the adjective relating to "forêt" (forest) and it is not related to "foret" (drilling bit) or "fort" (fort/strong/stronghold) or "force" (force/strength) which look and sound rather similar but have completely different meanings.
And as an English Canadian the accents give me a warning that Canadian French retains the vowels spelled in words like pâte and lá, even if Paris lost them.
The circumflexes are also useful to translate to English, which often retained the "s". Pâte/paste, hôte/host, forêt/forest, etc. (But I never figured out the gendre change in château - châtel - castle.)
Cool video! As a native French speaker from Switzerland, it was very informative about stuff you never learn in school because, well, you can just speak the language without really asking yourself why certain sounds are not pronounced
btw 1:22 the bottom right should be "ils écoutent". Probably just a copy & paste issue :)
You don't learn your own grammar in school?
French is actually very consistent, there are just a lot of rules that may seem like exceptions, but once you know that, for example, "eau" is pronounced "o" , it stays the same everytime for every word that contains this sequence of vowels. This same reasoning applies most of the time, and the rest is often simply regional variations winning out over others. I don't think any French person would snap at you for pronouncing a liaison in "Je peux aller" :)
Je peux aller with a liaison do not sound disgraceful at all (for me at least)
if French speakers will accept a liaison there, why doesn't that mean that the alleged rule about liaison being impermissible there is just a fiction? the goal is to describe how people actually use the language. if people ignore what is said to be a rule, it is not a rule. even if it was done in the past, it's not a rule anymore.
@@perfectallycromulent The liaison itself is a rule, it's the exceptions to the rules that are not universal, especially as you go from region to region.
@@perfectallycromulent i just said it out loud but that doesn't sound natural, so yeah don't do the liaison for that. But like the first comment said, i will not snap at somebody who makes the liaison.
There is some liaisons that if you makes them, the frenchs will laught (like "des haricots")
@@albevanhanoy sounds like there's no general rule, just regional rules, and that's my point.
Fun fact, korean actually has liaison too.
() is the spelling and the after is the pronunciation
읽다 (ilg da) il ta
(g affects the d→t)
읽어 (ilg ǒ) il gǒ
the g is pronounced because next syllable doesn’t have an initial consonant
The standard pronunciation of 읽다 is actually [ik.ta] (익따), although many Korean speakers (perhaps even the majority?) pronounce it as [il.ta] (일따). But yes, this phenomenon in Korean of normally silent letters surfacing under certain conditions can rightly be described as liaison.
@@brianonscriptyeah my mom speaks korean but i don’t so i probably got it wrong
after you told me on the other video that you played the guitar for your outro. I couldn't stop myself from saying here, I love hearing a calming guitar after a scary French video!
French was once the language of diplomacy, admired and chosen for its precision and nuance. Its rich lexicon and formal grammar provided an exceptional tool for articulating complex legal and diplomatic concepts with clarity and subtlety. The language's capacity for expressing distinctions and its courteous formulations made it an ideal medium for negotiations. French diplomacy's linguistic tradition offered a common platform for representatives of different nations to discuss, debate, and resolve international matters. The use of French in diplomatic communications ensured that every shade of meaning could be conveyed, reducing the potential for misunderstanding in sensitive negotiations. The preference for French in diplomatic circles was a testament to its perceived elegance and the historical influence of France on European culture and politics.
Which language has worse orthography? French or English?
Tibetan: *Nervous sweating*
We speak of europian languages.
what's up with tibetan spelling?
what's you native language?
A couple notes:
According to "le bon usage" (the correct speech, roughly) liaison is actually forbidden in "des haricots" and it's typically where speakers would make fun of a liaison there. It's technically optional because it can be made but it's not "optional" in the way that word is generally used. In fact it's a case of liaison between a determiner and its noun, which is a case of compulsory liaison, it is either compulsory or forbidden but it can't be optional.
Liaison in "je peux aller" is perfectly fine, if very formal and affected in my opinion. From my quick look-up only one source on the internet listed that kind of liaison as forbidden (i.e ungrammatical) yet to me it isn't shocking to my ear. I would consider that one to be in the optional category.
Finally, speakers from Québec will staunchly defend they pronounce the circumflex in a word like "être" differently from if it was spelt "ètre" which is only partially true. The same speakers don't need a circumflex to pronounce a long vowel in a word like "problème", "scène" or "hyène". Nor do they need one to pronounce /ɑ/ in "sable" or "espace" and despite being written with one "extrême" has a short /ɛ/ in Québec, make sense of that! The circumflex is really a big source of confusion for all French speakers out there, even for Canadian French speakers. The circumflex was intended to indicate long vowels that emerged from the loss of a /s/ (paste > pâte, estre > être, epistola > épître) or from the loss of /ə/ (debutus > deü > dû) but not all long vowels were indicated with that diacritic (flamme, zone, scène) and some inexplicably avoided it (racler, despite being a doublet of râler!!!) leading to a thoroughly incoherent system. If there was an indefensible part of the French orthography it would be that.
I’m a french speaker and I’ve never heard anyone do the liaison in "je peux aller", and I would never do it, I’m pretty sure it is a forbidden one.
Assuming you’re also a native speaker, if it sounds fine to you then it might just be a regional thing
@@mathieu9523Liaison is widely considered optional in "tu as attendu", I don't see what would be blocking it in "je peux aller".
@@mathieu9523 I'm a native french speaker too. I grew up in Brussels but my mother was from Paris and I spent a lot of time there so I think I can hear the differences between the "parisian" and "belgian" french. To me "je peu-z-aller" seems perfectly legitimate and I bet you would make the liaison in "je peu-z-y aller"
@@afuyeas9914 As said in the video, there’s no logic to it, liaison is also perfectly fine in "les hommes" but sounds ungrammatical in "les haricots" (although that is slowly changing)
@@PatrickIsbendjian That’s interesting, it might be a regional thing like I said, wouldn’t surprise me. Personally I wouldn’t say "je peu-z-y aller" either, but this could also be a generational thing. I find older people tend to pronounce way more liaisons than younger people. Even my parents do liaisons that I don’t do.
*Laughs as my language has a phonetic orthography*
You're laughing? French spells /u/ with a digraph and you're LAUGHING?
@@PlatinumAltaria Why are you assuming that I am french? We all know that french orthography is really a logography, so it is defintely not phonetic.
@@PlatinumAltaria Yes cos we dont speak french, its not our problem. We cry that english has just as much nonsense.
which language?
@@selladore4911 looking at their username, I suspect Polish, which isn’t fully phonetic, but it’s orthography is WAY BETTER than French or English.
Cant believe I predicted the K Klein video by doing my french lessons today
Silent letters of French remind me of final devoicing commonly found in central-eastern Europe, languages like German, Polish, Czech, Russian, Lithuanian and Bulgarian tend to ignore devoicing in spelling for grammatical reasons. For example Polish words like grad (hail) and grat (junk) are both pronounced /'grat/ but their spelling informs their declination patterns: grad->gradu vs grat->grata and in the case of grad->gradu /d/ is voiced when it wasn't before. Many speakers are unaware that there even is final devoicing in their language, which becomes an issue when they learn languages like English and pronounce words like dock and dog the same way.
In Czech, we mostly pronounce what is easier to pronounce when there is S, Z, T or D at the end of word, that's why we say beT instead of beD in English, when you try some app which can hear your pronunciation and forces you to pronounce correctly, you mostly fail on these basic English words, sometimes it takes a long time before you finally realize what is wrong about how you pronounced it. And this is also vice versa very often mistake which English speakers do when they learn Czech - they are trying to pronounce really D at the end etc...but we don't do that or when there is V, but it's easier to pronounce it with F, we say F, but English speaker is always trying to really pronounce V in word where it's impossible to pronounce it really with V, like in word všichni for example, you can't say V there without insterting extra vowel or doing pause after V.
It reminds you of it because it's exactly what happened. We underwent like 3 or 4 rounds of final consonant weakening (from voiced to unvoiced, to unpronounced) and also in the other parts of the word, from geminated to not, from affricate to simple plosive, from plosive to affticate to fricative, palatalizations....
00:26 🇫🇷 French spelling often includes silent graphemes, making it inconsistent and unpredictable.
00:53 📝 The pronunciation of final letters in French verbs depends on whether the verb starts with a vowel.
03:37 🗣️ "Liaison" is a feature in French where a silent final letter moves to the beginning of the following word when it starts with a vowel.
04:06 🎭 Adjectives in French have different spellings for masculine and feminine forms, providing phonetic information.
05:32 🎩 The circumflex accent in French often indicates where a lost letter used to be, offering historical insight into the language.
06:27 📚 French spelling, like English, has rules with numerous exceptions, making it a complex system to navigate.
The eau/elle/eaux/elles and al/ale/aux/ales rules are actually pretty standardized across so while they look weird they are pretty regular. As a phonological reason, it has to do with the l becoming a w sound. That's why for example how English castle and French château exist.
There's a lot of weird spelling rules with French but the one thing that is good about it that is superior to English is that with a few exceptions (like oignon in some accents) spelling may be unpredictable without knowing the origin of the word but if you are given a spelling after knowing a few rules and exceptions you pretty much will be able to know how to pronounce it 100% accurately.
French spelling is very logical in my opinion when you get to know it, like I get that it looks weird to english speakers because it looks so different. But the spelling/pronuncitation gets so consistent and predictable pretty fast as you're learning, something that CERTAINLY can't be said about english
No, its completely irrational. There is no reason what so ever to ever write a letter that doesnt corespond to any sound.
You do not speak French if you think this. Also consistently using a trigraph for a single sound is a bad consistency.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 Please read the "e" at the end of "write". What sound does it correspond to? I don't know how to pronounce it. What about the "k" of "know"? Or the "w" of "know"? Can you tell the difference when somebody is saying "know" or "no"? Ken ew tel th dyffrens?
@@elisaelisarossI'd like to add to this, that while French has many silent letters, they are logical, unlike English. In English you could take the world.. "could".. as an example. Why is the "l" silent? In french, all the silent letters follow a rule (no h:es, final letters silent). There is no rule for that unpronounced l in could, or the unpronounced e in unpronounced, you just have to learn it, like hieroglyphs.
I say this as a person who has learnt both as a foreign language, so there is no bias.
@@PlatinumAltaria True, I am not a native speaker so there are certainly things I do not know and there are differences in some spoken varieties I am unaware of. I personally think french is logical mainly in that the same combination of letter is almost always spelled the same way. Take "eaux" for example, even though it looks overwhelming at first it is always pronounced like the o in "song". Or that most consonants at the end of words are not pronounced, but they get pronounced if there if there is a vowel after it. Like how the t in "vert" is not pronounced but it is in "verte. In english I feel like it is a guessing game for new learners a lot of the time.
I have learned both English and French(to a lesser extent than English) as second languages for reference
Congratulations on 100k subscribers!! 🎉🎉🎉
Well done on 100k! 🎉
YES the fact you can look into the evolution of french when reading it is something that adds to the love in my love/hate relationship with french. im so glad someone agrees with me
I agree as a Frenchman it’s amazing and I would fight to death to defend our spelling
Having learned English as my primary foreign language, and French as the second one (although I am nowhere near fluent) the point in your video is what my French teacher always pointed out to me. French spelling is really scary at first, but there are rules! Even tho there are quite a few of them, once you memorize the rules, you can pronounce almost every French word you come across just by reading them. It makes sense all of the sudden. And that is not the case for English.
Love the video; French is my second language (but I am at a C2 level here in Québec). When I started learning it, I dreaded the spelling drills. Now, I find the spelling system even more useful than my native English at times.
I just wanted to point out an error (if you have the chance to change it).
At 1:19, you say "ils écoutent" , but the graphic shows "ils ont" again. The phonetic spelling below it is for "ils écoutent" , however.
I'm still intermediate in french so correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the beau-belle and nouveau-nouvelle in 6:47 their own rule which *is* consistent? the masculine is -eau unless infornt of a vowel where it becomes -el (bel) and the feminine is always -elle. sure, it's a different rule to learn, but it's a rule.
Je suis en train d'apprendre aussi, et j'ai pensé à la même chose.
@@taikurinhattu193 ah bien! je suis contente de savoir que je n'ai pas tort.
Yes, that's the rule. And when you know the historical reason, it makes sense. Final L after A, E and O hardened (think of the English final L) and finally became U (think of Brazilian Portuguese final L). At some point we had /bjaw/ hence the spelling BEAU and after that the pronunciation kept changing but not the spelling.
As a French native, I thank you for reestablishing the truth about our writing x)
And that my friend is why I love French. Complex and sometimes seems strange (when you don't know why it is like it is) but so beautiful and rewarding to master.
Fun fact : the "s" that disappeared (like in fenêtre) can come back in some words or verbs like in défenestrer meaning throwing trough the window (yes, french speakers are very precise in the way they eliminate people)
1:10 For people who don't know French (like me), I'm pretty sure the bottom right example is supposed to be "ils écoutent".
Let us not forget the English hypercorrections:
An adder was once "a nadder", and an apron was once "a napron".
And conversely, a newt was once "an ewte".
GOOD JOB ON 100K!!! 🎉
Thank you ! I laughed at "les z'haricots", that's indeed a polemical case ! I'm teaching French, and even though it's a messy deal, I do love it. I totally agree with the conclusion, I always say to my students that our language illustrates our love for the past (eh, we do have five different past tenses and that's just for the indicative mood !) : many of our silent letters are explained by their origins ('temps' comes from the latin 'tempus'), and they may reappear in words from the same family ('forêt' => 'forestier', 'déforestation').
Some of variations are explained by a long time popular use. An example : quite often, the diphtong 'au' is the contraction of a latin 'al' or 'el' : the latin verb 'salvare' (to save) gave the popular 'sauver', and the more refined 'salvateur' (adjective 'saving'). Same with 'calvus' (bald) => the popular root is 'chauve' and the refined one is 'calvitie' (baldness) ; same with 'bellus' (graceful) => 'beauté' ('beauty') 'beau' (masculine of 'beautiful') and then 'belle' (feminine of 'beautiful') and 'bellement' ('beautifully'). From there, you can understand some of those weird plurals animal => animaux, cheval => chevaux, mal => maux, travail => travaux....... aaaand I'll stop there and won't talk about the exceptions haha !
As for the silent "h", you can blame 99% of it on the Ancient Greek. Like I said, we're conservatives and love those old roots.
Anyway, if you're learning French, here's some tips :
- French is 80% Latin and 15% Ancient Greek. Knowing those ancient languages will help you A LOT. If you don't, rely on English, Spanish or Italian roots.
- There are a lot of rules, but don't panic. Read, practice, write, and you will integrate some patterns with time.
- There are also a lot of exceptions, to the point that some are almost rules themselves. Learn the more frequent exceptions (like 'oeil'/'yeux', 'beau'/'belle'), but other than that, if you're beginning, focus on the general rule. Better to learn one rule that works 80% of times, than the 15 rules that make the 20% left.
- It's okay to make mistakes. People will understand you anyway. Plenty of French are making mistakes. I make mistakes sometimes too ! A lot of Frenchies love to see foreigners learning French, and we find accents cute. If some froggies are shaming you, ask them how their 'é/er' or past participle concord's mastery is doing. And ask them to speak in YOUR language !
- A cultural warning : French are not sugar coating people, and even when they're appreciating something, they can't help searching for a detail to criticize. So if a French says 'Your French is good, but you should....', 'That was great, but it could have been.....', don't fret and be glad, you've been complimented by a French xD
It's les haricots not les zaricots. There's no debate !!! 😅
6:43 except except, it can also be "bel", another masculine form of beau, depending on if the noun is masculine AND starts with a vowel or an "h"
T_T
I like to think that written Norwegian is sensible as we got to start with relatively blank sheets in the 19th century and people looked towards French as an example on how to design a written language. But then we went ahead and made two official written languages along with a long string of changes with aim of unification which had to be abandoned due to how unpopular it was.
As a french, after learning about the poem "The Chaos" written by G. Nolst Trenite. I never want to heard an english person have the audacity to belittle our pronunciation! At least we have a lot more consistancy in our pronunciation, even if we have 4 ways to pronunce the same sound, we can at least read new word and pronounce them correctly 90% of the time on the first try. In english if you never heard the word before hand, the pronunciation is a lottery.
Francophone here, Yeah i agree for /z/ liaison. I prefer keeping the for warning about liaison and i think this is beneficial for learners. However, i think the -s muet should be strictly kept as a plural marker and abandonned in most other cases like 2nd person singular, sans "without" plus "no more" except when it marks a potential feminine like las, mis, confus... It should also be extended to all cases of plural like vous avez > vous avés. For words where there is a /z/ liaison in other environments, the a-t-il solution could be extended san-s avi for example. More generally, keeping muet -s's, -t's and -d's only in morphological positions and not in etymologycal ones.
I think the liaison for "des haricots" is a mistake which is just very common to hear because as you said it sometimes a word starting with an "h" have a liaison and sometimes no
It's indeed a mistake. I remember something like 15 years ago, we were hearing people say the rule had changed, and haricot was now allowed with liaison, and then stupid journalists repeated the news. I don't know who started this rumor but it was false. The Académie française is adamant : no liaison allowed for this word.
The fact that the modern spelling includes the history of the word is amazing to me. If you have some curiosity in live it should be amazing to you too.
Also premier -> première is 100% regular, you can’t write premiere so you add an accent matching pronunciation.
Your video and accent are really good !
Nice job !
For thoose who want to learn french, just take shows and movies you like and who were air on french télévision or Netflix, and watch them in French.
You'll learn a lot really quickly !
4:53 in spoken French, you can never know the feminine from the masculine. But usually silencing the final consonant of the feminine gives you the masculine
I must disagree. I speak five languages fluently and I can categorically say that one of the things that makes both French and English very elegant languages is precisely their orthographies, which are systems in themselves and carry the stamps of history and pedigree with them. I certainly appreciate the orthographies of languages such as Spanish or German, but French is in a sweet league all its own… much like English. Learning to write French correctly has always been a pleasure for me.
1:28 dear god if they can't protect us, this means the French have free rein :(
The problem with the circumflex is that it can represent so many different things depending on the word that the "history" it carries is impossible to guess. XD Sometimes it’s a disappeared letter (forest > forêt). Sometimes a disappeared syllable (anima > anme > âme). Sometimes it represents a Greek letter or some shit (symptôme vs. syndrome). And sometimes it’s just there for no discernable reason or disappears in derived words (grâce vs. gracieux).
But honestly… Once you got the basic rules down, reading French isn’t _that_ hard compared to English (it helps that we don’t have 158 different vowels). The hard part is knowing how to _write it_ .
Actually this makes me see some semblance between French and Korean spelling, for example the word for chicken is 닭 ("dak" ㄷ=d ㅏ=a ㄹ=l/r ㄱ =g/k) but as you can see the ㄹ isnt pronounced, at leat not until its connected to a syllable that starts with a vowel sound, for example "닭이 보여?" ("dalgi boyeo?" as the silent ㄹ isnt pronounced unless the following ㄱ is connected to the next syllable. So before it was "da(l)g" but now its "dal-gi boyeo" ("do you see the chicken?")
As a native French-speaker, that video gave me some horrifying flashbacks from when I was in primary/middle school, French grammar is absolutely hellish!
I've always wondered and had a great deal of respect for people who actually learn French "the hard way" as opposed to us who were just born in it...
Btw, your pronunciation isn't bad at all :D
ouais enfin ça dépend jusqu'où tu apprends, parce que pour le subjonctif de l'imparfait, qu'on apprenait encore quand j'étais gosse (j'ai 42 ans) mais que personne n'employait jamais à part pour produire un effet comique (mais qu'on croise dans des livres un peu anciens), c'était presque comme une langue étrangère (voire c'était contre-intuitif pour un natif) "que nous vinssions" du verbe -vaincre- venir, "que nous sussions" du verbe -sucer- savoir...
@@alienews0 Des pantalons rouges, mais des pantalons orange...
@@leamael00 euh... whaaaaat ??!
@@alienews0 C'est horrible, je sais.
La règle c'est : adjectif de couleur, on accorde SAUF si c'est un adjectif de couleur provenant d'un nom (marron, orange, kaki, etc) SAUF pour rose, mauve, pourpre et écarlate qu'on accorde quand même because reasons.
@@leamael00 ah ok, comme c'était une réponse qui m'était directement adressée, je cherchais un rapport direct avec le contenu de mon commentaire, mais en fait tu abondais dans mon sens sur l'idée ça peut être l'enfer même pour des natifs. J'avoue que j'ignorais cette règle (ou plus précisément je l'avais oubliée car j'imagine qu'on a dû me l'apprendre à un moment ou à un autre de ma scolarité).
En tout cas merci pour l'info, c'est effectivement assez capilo-tracté comme règle (surtout les exceptions dans les exceptions).
Oh et j'avoue avoir été aussi choqué par son intro, pendant 1 seconde je me demandais ce que "jouaient" foutez là, puis j'ai réalisé qu'il y avait toutes les voyelles à la suite sauf le y. 5 voyelles consécutives sans consonne pour les aérer je comprends que ça soit choquant pour un étranger, alors que nous on a croisé ce verbe dès nos début en lecture et on a pas eu l'occas de s'en offusquer (ou j'ai oublié parce que ça remonte à trop loin^^)
One of the more interesting aspect of silent letters is that it's a remnant of the specific era of the french language being a very top-down, normalized language reflecting social and political situations centuries in the past. Some wanted to conceive it as latin was : a language that could be used in its written form completely removed from its spoken form so anyone anywhere could use french as a universal language for written communication in the context of diplomacy and politics.
It didn't work in the long run, not even close, but it does very much explains why some convoluted oddities exist.
The cases of peu/peut/peux or ces/ses/c'est/s'est are great examples of elements that change nothing phonetically but are still there so you can build increasingly complex and long sentences where every grammatical link can be made and you can track exactly what refers to what, how each part of the sentence relates to any other WITHOUT the use of cases.
It was all rules made by very involved, elitistic people for other very involved elitistic people and that's why instead of going the english route where "set", "go" and "put" have hundred of possible meanings, ces/ses/c'est/s'est have different spellings.
tl;dr : the rules of the french language were written by fancy people for fancy people and no one is fancier than the Académie Française in the 1600s and 1700s
Thanks a lot for this analysis! And above all for your conclusion. I've always loved this feature in french (as French myself) that the words' spelling speak of their history, and history of langage. Looking back in time, that's exactily that!
And there are nice links with other langages. For instance: we have two words "tache" and "tâche" (pronounced identically). But "tache" means "stain" and "tâche" means "task". See how the "s" reappears in english? And there are identical examples with spanish too, or italian. While spanish modified its grammar and spelling to fit to the pronounciation french remained a written langage. And thus carries its history with it.
My apologies les amis for giving you such a hard time.
At least our writing system and times* are more nuanced therefore, in many aspects, clearer towards the informations conveyed than english once mastered 😉
Also liaisons allow to process words more fluidly and trully become a second nature and logical after some practice. It just seems so natural to us maybe some teachers don't quite know how to explain it... though many Frenchs tend to barely use them if not at all... many are not that good at their own language.
Also, for Jacques, or others... consider the end of these names as plural nounces suffixes. Silent.
I'm not a linguist, but the other accents except the low and the high one... are there by legacy of old forms, same as for some nounces orthograph that come out of the blue. These accents still depend on the two pronounciation standard. [^] being just as the low accent. And [ë] depending on the word, but mostly low. On any other letter he's silent and helps you memorize the word and it's connotation which is mostly nordic, or used for hebrew names...
We don't mind pronounciation actually, and orthograph is tricky for everyone... myself I have doubts about many words for double consonnants or other stuff. Everything in French is a mix up, of many dialects, many reforms, many reforms of the reform that brought back some old-ass reform to be more rightful towards the-egwiwohwgeegegwhuwueye etc.
Differences between spoken and written is part of the heart of French. It would be utterly boring and flat otherwise...
Anyways this guy summed everything up great and it's cool to see everyone here interested in French!
N'abandonnez pas!
*you have mostly tences, we have mostly times.
Probably the worst thing that English could've copied from French, and not only did they do just that, they somehow made it even worse.
The French actually made the effort to remove the 's' in "isle" making it "île", meanwhile English _added_ a silent 's' to its equivalent to make it look more like "isle": "island". Unlike in French, that 's' was never pronounced to begin with.
The germanic word was always iland so I thats how I actually write it.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 I absolutely agree with de-frenchifying English like that. At the same time, it _does_ look a little weird as a native English speaker, but that's just because I've been brainwashed by existing English orthography.
@@angeldude101 You mean english spelling. English ortography would have the word be written as iland in old english and ailand in modern english.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 𐑲𐑤𐑩𐑯𐑛 :P
I'm not sure on the distinction between "orthography" and "spelling" (beyond one word being Greek and the other Germanic). From a quick google search, orthography seems to refer to the established "correct" way to write as a whole, whereas spelling seems to refer specifically to the arrangement of letters in a given word.
@@angeldude101 The way I speak, spelling is what a spellchecker cares about and what youll get points deducted for in school. Ortography is the collection rules by which a script is used to write a language in.
Spelling is when the world /bəɹdi:/ should be written as birdy.
Ortography is for example saying that in english the letter y is used at the end of words to mark the /i:/ sound. Or that if a word has a /b/ sound you write a b letter.
Wow! Very cool that it took me this video to realize yeux was a case of liaison, I never thought about how it (almost?) always shows up following an underlying s.
This also makes it a somewhat less weird pluralization. I think because there's always that plural déterminant before it, I reanalyzed it as being /zjø/.
Great video, I think you could have dug a tiny bit deeper on the ^ accent as it is indeed an indication of a lost letter, but also an indicator of how to spell a derivated adjectives/words where the lost letter reappears as in forêt > forestier, hôpital > hospitalier etc
I think Danish orthography is much scarrier
ils ont duplicated by accident oh no
The spelling of French adds character(s) to the language and builds character in the learner.
03:59 "Complicated, stupid, but weirdly gracefull."
Sums it all up ! [mic drop]
We study French in my school, and the thing that bothers me is the amount of hyphens, accent marks and apostrophes. Like, to say "What is this"? You need to write "Qu'est-ce que ç'est"? Also, I'm Italian, a language where every letter except the H is always pronounced, which means that learning to pronounce something is very difficult.
Ma penso che gli accenti siano opportunità e quando conosci le regole etimologiche è più facile sapere quale è la parola equivalente in italiano. (Sono francese, il modo di scrivere il francese è la cosa che mi aiuta di più quando sto imparando l'italiano)
C'est = celà est, so you need the '
And in proper formal French " qu'est ce que c'est ? " is "qu'est ce ?"
As I'm currently trying to learn french, this couldn't have come at a more appropriate time. I didn't struggle *nearly* so much with spanish, and they're both romance languages.
They're all drunk. I swear.
I find Spanish more confusing in general because you have to learn all the conjugations before you can understand the subject of a sentence.
The conjugations based on person and number really aren’t that bad. The hard part is once you have to conjugate for each tense, but at least Spanish spelling is extremely phonetic and most verbs are mostly regular.
@@alexzgreat133 that's what I mean. In French, you can figure out the subject without knowing a single tense's conjugation because subject is a requirement. In Spanish, you can't. It's even worse because the first person singular present is very similar to the third person singular simple past.
@@tigrafale4610a lesson I learned from Japanese is that the subject isn't really that important in a sentence . Although with grammatical indication, Spanish speakers would probably be less clear about the subject, but I think the context give enough information most of the time.
The conjugations still sucks though.
Well of course, Spanish is the easiest Romance language to learn by far
Loved the reference to the English spelling video in the intro
Hey, K Klein! Would you be able to tell us please what are your favourite books?
Frenschue spuellingue iesnte thaete baede
*iêsnte
@@ILikedGooglePlus*hiêsntent
Aïe ouile dou iou ouane béteure. Laitte eusse si if iou are ébeule tou quippe heupe ouize zis orthographie.
@@Falzar514 zàtte ouase quoiet ze challenge
@@Falzar514 aïme seaurri forre ioux but aïe (k)nôhoue français vaires houelles sohou aïe ouile quippe heupe forre a oiylle
I have a question : did you select the first French flag you googled or was that a thoughtful decision?
Hey, it's Klein, I wouldn't be surprised if he peppered the video with a random mix of Belgian and Senegalese flags.
In Polish, “ó” & “u” represents the same vowel - /u/ - the cause of having them, but not having Old Polish “é” or “á” is:
1)“é” & “á” becomed pronounced identicly with innaccentual variaty
2)“ó” & “o” are interchanging - words “mowa” & “mówić” are related - always, when you have “ó”, related word can have “o” or “ó” - broda-bród
In Bariopolish, that is kinda a language, these changes becomes extremum - but I don't write reduced vowels - in contrast to “ioting vowels” - Bariopolish has independent palatalisation, where “i” can be /i/ or be “silent” - like “ri” is /z/, not /ri/ - or “V́” can be silent with special diacritic - “ké” is /ce/, but “ké̦” is /c/
Some languages has too many phonological rules to even have consistent & easy ortography - but all are beautiful, cuz' ortography can take to us taste of language
My French teacher at school used to test us on this by making us take dictation on passages he'd read out in absurdly esoteric language. Those at the top of the class - and the native French speakers - were usually pretty bang on with spelling. French is consistent and when you know how it works, it works. Certainly, you never have any problem the other way round - reading it out.
Are there many languages where spelling is exactly equal to pronounciation? On a scale from spanish to chinese, I feel like english is further on the "words as idioms" side than french. Language is also written, an those silent letters help a lot with reading comprehension. One byproduct also overlooked is wordplay, the weirder the rules are, the more you can have fun with it and be creative somehow.
In most of the world languages are closer the spelling is very close to pronounciation. Because the writing system was created very recently. The only exceptions are the langauges which have a very old writing system and so the sounds evolved over time while the writing stayed the same. So English, French, Greek, Tibetan, Thai, Hebrew, etc. But since those are often more important globally than African languages or Native American languages, people think it's very common to not have a phonetic writing.
All phonetic writing systems slowly break down due to spellings not keeping up with sound changes. But you can actually just... change the spellings.
@@PlatinumAltaria which is why prescriptivists who insist we have to keep spelling things a certain way drive me up the wall, let language evolve you tardigrades!
"Are there many languages where spelling is exactly equal to pronounciation?" Latviešu, lietuviešu, estonian, ...
"On a scale from spanish to chinese, I feel like english is further on the "words as idioms" side than french." And spanish is actually in the middle with most europian languages being more phonetic.
"Language is also written, an those silent letters help a lot with reading comprehension." No!
"One byproduct also overlooked is wordplay, the weirder the rules are, the more you can have fun with it and be creative somehow." And the harder it is to write songs since how a word is written and said are nothing like.
@@PlatinumAltaria When a man of my nation says /vaig/ I write down vaig because thats what he said. I do not write vajag, he is clearly speaking in slang so I write down slang. If he spoke the good language and actually said /vajag/ only then would I write down vajag, because thats what he said.
The most annoying thing about French spelling is that it could very easily be fixed, yet any time I suggest this to a French person they go on a tirade about how it's spiritually important to spell /wazo/ with 7 letters. The French need to be like the English, and accept that our languages are atrocious messes.
Should the Chinese and Japanese abandon their hieroglyphics too then ?
@@gamermapper The Chinese languages are actually pretty well-suited to their writing system, although it could definitely be streamlined. And Japanese already has a suitable replacement: hiragana; its actual spelling is pretty good. English and French both need comprehensive spelling reforms.
@@gamermapper Yes! No logography!
No, just do writing reform write /wazo/ as wazo.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 you are out of luck, there are a lot of homonymes word in french, do they have to change the sound of words to differenciate them with this new writing reform? I know what this combination of letters "oiseau" means, but if you change it to "wazo" I don't know the shape of that word. Again, language is not only spoken it is read and when reading you dont actually sound out each syllable at a time like a child learning, you see words you recognize as an image to get meaning.
The mere fact that English speaking people DARE to question French clarity is hilarious.
Okay, I finished your video and this is my last comment: you understand really well french, I congratulate you.
Vous comprenez vraiment bien le français; je vous félicite.
I've been studying French for more than 10 years. People like to say that English has inconsistent pronunciation, but knowing both, I strongly believe that French is worse. Sometimes H is aspirated and sometimes it's not. Sometimes several letters are silent and sometimes none are. All of this stuff, you just need to know. It's not at all intuitive for second-language learners.
We can agree that both language are a pain when it comes to pronunciation, but I disagree that French is worse. For an ESL seeing a new word in English, there's just no way to know the right pronunciation without hearing it. Even for native English speaker, it's often a wild guess.
In French, as fucked up the rules are, a native speaker will have no trouble pronouncing it. Most exceptions are learned very quickly, so even French learners can have a fair shot if they know the rules well enough.
I do agree that the silent H thing is a pain in the ass, but it rarely affect the understanding thankfully (and even native speakers don't agree, most of the time).
French is a million times better. Once you know the rules and the most common exceptions, you can basically just read a book and be sure you're pronouncing the vast majority of words correctly. In English, you might struggle with 10 different attempts of figuring out how a single word is meant to be pronounced.
As a non-native speaker of both French and English (and my French is really rusty at this point), I have to say that French spelling felt way harder than English spelling. But I think the main reason is that I had started learning English earlier than French and I had more exposure overall to written English than written French.
The main problem that people have with English spelling is its apparent randomness so you have to invest enough enough time and repetitions to memorize a correct spelling and pronunciation.
The spelling of French, in my opinion, must deal with a larger amount of homophones. As a consequence, it often sacrifices ease of spelling for ease of readability. Another problem is the unnecessary use of participle agreement which is hard to learn, hard to use, and somewhat artificial (a bit like writing modern Greek with three different accent marks instead of one and with two historical aspiration marks instead of... zero). It was even anachronistic in the 16th century when French no longer pronounced final s, and didn't distinguish between é and ée in speech. Why people ever thought it was a good idea I have no clue.
wait french has aspiration??
@@selladore4911 No, it doesn't but as said in the video, some H are still letting the liaison pass through them. That's the one we call "silent H" even if they're technically all silent, haha.
Ils écoutent, not ils ont. Little mistake on your slide. Now that would be terrible french spelling. 1:17
i know i know such an annoying mistake
Grattis till 100k subs. Välförtjänt 🎉
honestly, the funny thing about French spelling is that Old French spelling seems paradoxically more intuitive than later Middle French and then Modern French spelling. This is because Old French spelled like it was pronounced, which then still fits very well to the modern language if you are aware of the sound changes and how sounds drop at the end of words.
But Middle French actually added a bunch of silent letters that were never pronounced to make the words look more like their Latin counterparts, some cases even got silent letters based on wrong etymology. One example being "poids" (which was "pois" in Old French), which has its "d" from influence mistaken belief of it being related to Latin "pondus", but in reality it comes from the same word that gives us Spanish "peso"
Not to mention the mess they made of spelling "x" at the end of words (x was used as a shorthand for "us", but then they added the "u" back, giving us a bunch of words ending in "ux" like "beaux" that have a silent "s", which really should just be spelled "beaus" imho)
So yeah, in my opinion if they had stuck with something closer to the Old French spelling it would actually be a bit better, as ironic as that sounds hah
I've always thought that its been extremely hypocritical and searching for why we aren't the worst in terms of spelling consitance because english doesn't have the rules and patterns (though it has the history) like shown, over our entire spelling system to same "power" as even french. To be fair french is in another teir in terms of order in spelling language wide. I'm not saying english should have "good" spelling as in someways its a unifying force like chinese characters, no matter their pronunciation each word have the same spelling, alowing for communitcation rather than the easy of use for one specific "correct" pronunciation.
English spelling does have rules... so does French: the problem is that the rules suck and are bad.
@@PlatinumAltariaas a French (and English for that matter though nowadays I am not learning anymore so I'm cutting off English content so I can focus on French) learner I don't think the rules are that bad, since there aren't many and I have noticed almost no inconsistencies, the only one is the word oignon, but nowadays the consistent spelling ognon is recommended, so that isn't a problem anymore either.
Using red to show masculine and blue to show feminine is truly evil. I love it!
Red is the colour of blood, an aggressive colour, suitable for a warrior. Of course it is masculine.
Blue is a calm colour, and also the colour associated with Virgin Mary. Of course it's feminine.
@@vytah You could theoretically make an argument of that form for any set of colors lol
as a french i can tell you our language 's rules makes a lot of sense but our history is so rich that you need a lot of historical knowledge to understand all of them .
As mentioned by other comments, the circonflex does make a difference in some accents, usually lengthening the vowel or changing the phoneme slightly (although it's not always throughout all words), but so far I haven't seen anyone talking about another important feature: it links the word to words formed on the same root where the s is still pronounced. You will say hôpital (/o.pi.tal/ or /ɔ.pi.tal/, noun) but hospitalier (/ɔs.pi.ta.lje/, adjective), or forêt (/fɔ.ʁɛ/, noun) but forestier (/fɔ.ʁɛs.tje/, adjective or related job), for example.
On a side note, I also don't understand what premier/première is doing in your list of non-transparent feminines. The feminine of words ending in -er is fairly consistant and follows the same rule as vert/verte or mauvais/mauvaise, where the added e reactivates the consonant.
I can't believe K Klein himself would end up advocating for irregular silent letters, not after the oignon video xd.
it is that bad
English : one way to write it, a thousand ways to say it.
French : one way to say it, a thousand ways to write it.
I feel like french works from written to spoken, while english works mostly from spoken to written.
With the very example you gave "a" becomes "an" because it'd be annoying to pronounce otherwise, but the "n" bears no semantic weight.
However in french the "s" in "ils" bears a MASSIVE semantic weight, showcasing the mark of the plural, and then after the spoken french is impacted when the verb after starts with a vowel.
As a native french speaker, I almost see/feel the written words in my head as I speak them.
Likewise as a child I only understood and mastered a lot of french (even oral) rules *after* I had learnt to read and write.
I do "see" (or feel) the written word when I speak. For example, if I say "Elles sont épuisées" (they are exhausted) I see the ending "ées" and not "er" or "é"
@@snapshot9954 Precisely ! I still see/feel the plural or feminine flexional endings even when they're not pronounced, because to me "épuisé" and "épuisées" don't exactly feel like the same word.
@K Klein, useful video, thanks.
Only by 1'10" where you meant to write "ils écoutent" we have "ils ont", so it is wrong every time the graph reappears.
personally i always found spelling french words easier and more intuitive than finding the correct place for the adjective and the correct way to relate the adjective to the noun