COLOURS ARE FUCKING COLOURS. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING, FRANCE?!

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[–] 26 points 2 months ago (7 children)

Big complaints from someone with a language where the connection between the written text and its pronunciation can only be described as rather weak.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Well yeah, but one of the big reasons for that is actually the French. See: The Norman Conquest.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    English is a wreck of three other languages but at least we escaped gendered nouns and adjectives. That’s got to be the most pointless language feature of all time.

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  • [–] 25 points 2 months ago (11 children)

    Cut cut cut... WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING ENGLISH !?

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  • [–] 18 points 2 months ago (10 children)
  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago (8 children)

    The /u:/ ones are nearly all French words and to put gouda there is just wrong

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Well the Anglo-Saxons should gave fought better at Hastings, then there wouldn't be French words here. But I'm not sure it would be simpler.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    It would still be a mixup. Starting from Celtic, then western Germanic (Angels and Saxons), Latin, northern Germanic (Scandinavians) already form a wild brew. French is only the latest major addition.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago* (5 children)

    Gouda belongs in the left column. Or, if you want to get close to the original Dutch, in the right one. But definitely not in the second one.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (4 children)

    kinda, yeah.. the ou in gouda is more like an au diphtong, almost as in out (in simplified english)

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    If it's coming from french it's definitely in the second column. I didn't know anglophones pronounced it like that

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    The French have more than enough cheeses on their own.

    Gouda is Dutch. Definitely. I've been there. I've bought the cheese there.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    Yes it's dutch, but the word Gouda in the English language could be coming from french, and the pronunciation in french these days is like the second column

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    There is no reason for "Gouda" coming from French. The Dutch have been quite able to trade with England, especially London, for a long time, and have contributed to the English language all on their own.

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  • [–] 22 points 2 months ago* (2 children)

    The change is due to the gender Le manteau (masculine "le") La veste (feminine "la"). Many languages have the same concordance between gender and adjectives.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    I think it's more about how this doesn't follow the usual rule for adjective agreement. By that rule it would be le manteau blanc / la veste blance, but that sounds weird and un-French I suppose so "blanche" it is. (I don't know French very well so take this all with a grain of salt)

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  • [–] 16 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Italian: many body parts are male gendered in singular, like arm: "braccio" and use the relative article; so "the arm" is "il braccio". However, to make the plural, you use the female gendered SINGULAR version of the word and the female plural article. So "the arms" become "le braccia". But that only works for some body parts, as others work differently!

    Eg: with foot and feet, we use the normal rule: foot (piede) is male so uses the male singular article (il piede). And feet (piedi) remains male and uses the male plural article (i piedi). However, hand (mano) is considered a female gendered word (although it ends with -o which generally means it's male gendered) and uses female articles.

    Also: we don't talk about accents.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (2 children)

    Ma braccia non è singolare femminile di braccio. È solo il plurale che diventa femminile come "le carceri"

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Lo so, ma è "singolare" nel senso che la maggior parte dei sostantivi italiani finiti in -a o in -o sono singolari. Quando uno impara la lingua venendo da altre, risulta abbastanza confusionario perche una delle prime cose che si capiscono è che in base alla vocale con la cui finisce il sostantivo o l'aggettivo, si può evincere se questo è singolare, plurale, maschile o femminile ma con le parti del corpo questo non si applica.

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  • [+] 16 points 2 months ago (5 children)
  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    You can't just leave us with that.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 months ago*

    That regular. This lesson is just written by someone who barely knows french.

    The regular feminin form for adjectif ended in -c in the masculin form is to end either in -che [ʃ] or [k] .

    Blan-c / blan-che Se-c / se-che Fran-c / fran-che

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  • [–] 14 points 2 months ago

    Sir the title is in English the most irregular language known to mankind

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  • [–] 12 points 2 months ago

    Some punk knocks down the Tower of Babel and now we gotta deal with shit like this

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    Ehm... this is super common

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 months ago (5 children)

    Ok but hear me out. What if colours just had one word instead of two?

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  • [–] 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

    It is the same word

    Edit: i still understand being puzzled by this, but the thing is, learning a language partially forces you to learn how the native speakers think... i would even argue that is the final milestone on learning a language.

    Spanish found a way to supress the subject from it's sentences

    Germans speak as if they were assembling a puzzle

    Japanese looks like a programming language... pretty neat

    Russian has two different plurals and the quantity that makes a word fall in the first one or the second one is "arbitrary".

    I know this looks like a gigantic mountain to climb, but i assure you that as you advance, things will progressively make more sense

    spoilerThat does not apply to the numbers... it feels like a toddler forgot how to count and started making up shit. What really bothers me is not that but the amiguity.. 4 20 sounds exactly as 80

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago

    Estonians found a way to communicate without sex, future, articles or prepositions. Oh, sounds like a super easy language to learn with fewer things in it, right? Fuck you, we have 14 cases so we could tell foreigners from native speakers by how they confuse genitive and partitive, two of the most basic cases. And then most cities, towns, villages you'd go to use illative ("into") to say "I'm going to X", but some will be allative ("onto") and there's no rule for it, so people from other parts of the country might not know it and it'll sound super weird.

    And I still find English to be the weird language. Just look at the different words written as "lead". Why are they pronounced so differently?! Nothing is pronounced as written.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    It is not an ambiguity, it is a remaining from a popular way to count. Just as you may count per hundreds and 4 100 sounds like 400, and means it. But you may also count things by dozen (most likely for eggs...).

    Yet you may use “octante” (beligum) or “huitante” (swiss) instead of “quatre-vingt”.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago

    Bruh its like spanish with -a or -o suffixes...

    In french you just add -e at the end (like brun/brune), in this case you have to add an h cause blance is ugly, so its blanche, and every word ending with a c is the same (sec/sèche for example). Pretty normal...

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    Blanc i Blanca

    French is not that special.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago

    I think the point here is that the feminine form of blanc is blanche, ending in -che which is irregular. If it were regular it would be blance, but it's not because blance sounds stupid.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    You guys have it easy. In my native tongue every verb changes depending on noun's gender, tense, while nouns change depending on - I shit you not - how much cute it is.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (2 children)

    I'm fascinated. Can I ask which language?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 child)

    Sure, it's Polish.

    Example, verbs:

    "I was" in Polish - byłem (male) byłam (female) byłom (neither, not really in use, but technically correct).

    Example, nouns:

    "A cat" - kot (male), kotka (female).

    "Kitty" - kotek (male), koteczka (female).

    Then depending on cuteness informal obligatory rule gradient is:

    koteczek (male) koteczka (female),

    kitek (too cute for gender),

    kituś (much too cute for gender),

    kituniek (cuteness, love and sugar overload, gender does not exists in the universe, you have seen the face of god and they are bliss).

    Works for every verb, but there are grammar rules and shitton of exceptions in the gradient.

    Exit: I forgot to purr form kiciuś/kicia, and I have no idea where it should be on the gradient

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Next topic: When and when not to pronounce a consonant as schwa /ə/.

    Spoiler: It depends

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] [S] 2 points 2 months ago

    'I am mechanic who plays a soccer'.

    Yes, very cool France. Thank you.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    Don't think! Memorize!

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    Its counter intuitive but a certain amount of irregularity helps languages. By far the easiest rated languages are isolating and lightly inflecting langauges, and from my experience this is even true if your native language is agglutinative. What a lot of these "easy" languages have in common is that theyre not inherently regular, they have irregular word endings and totally arbritary ways of constructing sentences in a way to convey meaning. On the other hand you have of course the languages that are just so irregular that theres no vibe you can go off of like in romance languages(theyre extremely easy to learn if you move to place where theyre spoken) like navajo. Many words go from "i mean that "s" or "a" fits there" to "why is the word form changing completely in this one specific case", on other words you loose all grounding. But i believe the reason a lot of people struggle with highly synthetic languages is the exact opposite, you have to specify everything in the right way or your sentence wont make sense. In highly irregular languages any piece of a sentence could be very important to the meaning, in a highly regular language every piece of the sentence is important to the meaning and right in the middle are languages that mostly follow rules but not always. Also in very regular languages its often not possible to make the reductions which humans love to do. You might have to specify a piece of information over and over in different ways without it leading to the sentence being more understandable. Idk these are my two cents as a definitely native speaker of hungarian and kinda sorta native english speaker.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    This is why Lojban is the best language.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (1 child)
  • Languages have made-up rules by people trying to bring some order into the chaos that actual languages are. The only point of languages is to bring some point across. As long as the receiver understands what the sender was trying to say, it worked. No matter how "wrong" someone else might find it. All the crap about grammar and spelling is like >90% classism.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago* (2 children)

    We actually have this in English too. For example, the masculine form is "the white coat" where the feminine is "the eggshell jacket". It's similar with most colors, with multiple irregular feminine forms for each color.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Too bad there's not malpractice but for cops

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    The rules on colors in french are impossible to memorize I swear

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    thats why i hate languages. they have like 500 rules, and then break them half of the time and you just have to know when that is the case

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  • [–] -1 points 2 months ago

    French is ass

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