French spelling USED to make sense! [Long Short]

[@bcjmythical9576]

To be fair, this also goes for Middle English and Modern English. Take the word knight, in MidE it would be how you spell it, but in ModE it would be something like "nait"

[@olivier0092]

If you read it out with German, Frysian, or Dutch pronunciation, it still works too. It means 'helper', which makes sense imo.

[@YaamFel]

gh would make a velar fricative, which doesn't exist in most dialects anymore, but otherwise yea

[@mattybrunolucaszeneresalas9072]

No. Middle English pronounced it nehht

[@speedyx3493]

@@mattybrunolucaszeneresalas9072What? No it didn't. It was pronounced /knixt/ (maybe with a long /i/ at some point) in Middle English. The /k/ sound didn't disappear untill the late 17th century (so Early Modern English, not Middle English), in fact, it was the /x/ (or /ç/ depending on the dialect and time) sound that disappeared first in most dialects

[@mattybrunolucaszeneresalas9072]

@@speedyx3493 what?? No. It wasn’t until the late 14th or 15th century that the K disappeared ! I know this for a fact!

[@Wicycool]

as a french learner i always forget to not pronounce -ent for plural verbs, so it's interesting to see that it used to be pronounced!

[@mercenaryforhire3453]

If you look at latin verb conjugation, you'll notice the endings are pretty similar. The -nt was already there and used to be pronounced accordingly.

[@CheetahBoy-gx2dx]

Ne t'inquiète pas, as you keep learning, you will get used to the pronounciation. Bonne chance !

[@object-official]

why are you here?

[@rickles6499]

I've literally pronounced it that way for 2 years, and it's hard to change that 😭😭

[@taikurinhattu193]

Yeah, but thankfully it's always that way (another French learner)

[@EdKolis]

So basically French used to be pronounced like someone who doesn't know anything about French would pronounce it. They must have made it more complicated to keep it a secret from everybody! 😂

[@xouxoful]

Ok, can we talk about English spelling now ?😊

[@marcellomancini6646]

It's weird cause Italian is still pronounced phonetically the same way it was in the 1300s

[@viitorulatrecut]

I think thats because they had more spelling reforms to keep the language updated plus modern Italian is based on the Tuscan dialect, which is said to have conserved more features from Latin than others, like Sicilian for example.

[@marcellomancini6646]

@@viitorulatrecut what spelling reforms are you talking about?

[@viitorulatrecut]

@@marcellomancini6646 Italian was adopted as an everyday written language long after French and English were. In medieval central Italy, literacy meant the ability to read and write Latin (and perhaps Greek if one was really learned)-that is, until influential writers like Dante and Petrarca wrote in a somewhat artificial version of il dialetto fiorentino and made it prestigious. Use of this vernacular was further bolstered by the regional political influence that Tuscany enjoyed from the early Renaissance on, but it wasn't (at least not in the modern sense) a national language until 1861. By then the written form of the language was fairly stable. I think there was a final orthographic reform in the early 20th century.

[@marcellomancini6646]

@@viitorulatrecut Oh thanks for sharing, I didn't know about these reforms cause they don't seem to be pretty big but of course in our schools we aren't taught how Dante and Bocaccio pronounced it

[@Gab8riel]

​@@viitorulatrecutSardinian is far closer to Latin and very different from Tuscan. Also in Classical Latin the 'G' is always a hard 'G' like in the word 'gas'.

[@Anhonime]

bro, I made a conlang in middle school and kinda kept using (in private notes, to talk to myself, it expanded to my dreams/fantasies (and I took some of it from my dreams tbh, it's a kinda back-and-fourth; I have schizoid personality disorder, so my fantasy worlds get INTENSE)) and expanding it to this day, the first note of its existence is from 2011 (but I likely played around in lost notebooks as early as 2009-2010, generally the period before 2012 is considered a "proto form") and around 2016 it achieved some maturity i.e. it wasn't just random words I stole from the languages I was learning at the time or just random syllables I made it that kept shifting meaning, tied together with a very loose grammar, by then it had a solid set of set-in-stone words, proper phonetics and grammar (pre-2012 is the "proto form", 2012-2016 is the first version, very much a nooblang, 2016+ is, let's say, the "early modern" form) - I can read my notes from that time and understand the recordings, albeit with some mental pain anyway, the point is, the language has existed for 8~12 (14 if we're very loose with definitions) years and I'm the sole native speaker (unless imaginary friends and dream entities count, lol), and by this point, there's a clear difference between the written and the spoken form and, although it obviously started as a fully phonetic language (with the major orthographic reform in 2016), by now I pronounce some words the "colloquial" way (and the "standard" form feels weird to use) but I write them down according to the way I pronounced them a few years ago, because I got used to the spellings and spelling them out as they're said feels very sloppy and weird (unless it's meant to be all chill and homely, or to make it rhyme in poetry - it's insane how much I get from a silly conlang started in middle school, but you probably need to be schizoid or something related to get it, lol) - long story short, I definitely get how natural languages end up this way, I've been running this little rapid-evolution experiment in my head and it works exactly the same (being the only native speaker helps a lot with rapid evolution) to give one example: a common noun ending is -ya (if it's from Latin -ia, or Semitic -(i)yā (I speak Hebrew), idk), you can just slap the bad boy onto any verb to get a gerund / verbal noun (mā = make -> māya = creation) or an adjective (they're also kinda verbs, won't bother you with all my silly grammar, look up how Japanese -i adjectives work for a vague idea) to make it into a noun (bā = beautiful -> bāya = beauty) originally the stress was always on the last syllable, no matter what, but you get used to these verbal forms and there's also vowel reduction (and preserving the stem matters way more than preserving the suffix), so many of these little suffixes became reduced and unstressed, moving stress to the penultimate syllable in most nouns, that includes the ending -ya which shifted to -sə or even -s in spoken speech (-y- changing to -s- could be from Italian, idk, it also helps to avoid forming diphthongs cos *māy could end up as *mē easily) so, for example, "humanity" (a very common word because it's used every time you speak about humans collectively) is spelled "myāmya" but pronounced "myāms(ə)" (spelling out the former is kinda like using "bro" instead of "brother" - know your context; but also that's how you pronounce it even in formal situations by now) there are also cases of ə dropping, forming either a consonant cluster or, usually, vocal l/r (ər -> r, əl -> l), e.g. fōšəl -> fōšl so yeah, I saw these things happen in front of my own eyes, so I totally get it

[@viperking6573]

This is so interesting 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

[@fariesz6786]

yay for conlangs! my longest-running one also has gone through a bit of that. besides phonemes changing, like tenuis /t/ and /q~k/ becoming ejectives (before i knew what ejectives are, they just became more and more pronouncedly unaspirate) and /w/ and /r/ turning voiceless, there's also some considerable vowel reduction that is not reflected in spelling; mostly bc the stress pattern is repeated iambic and that is very regular and so in compounds the stressed and unstressed position may undergo a switcheroo: ‹oril› "piece, element" being more or less [ɦ̩ˈr̥iʎ] in isolation, but something like ‹wil'oril› "a hand/finger-element, an individual finger" is [ʍʎ̩ˈɔr̥ʎ̩] - all of those were originally intended to be pronounced clear and neat. also ‹aizoi› "good, round" going from intended [äˌiθɔˈi] to [ɦ̩ˌiθ̞˞w̩ˈi]

[@catmoon95]

Technically you're not a native speaker as it's not your first language

[@alpaga4820]

It is very impressive to be able to keep track of a language only you speak! All I have to say is btavo 👏👏👏

[@bluepieouo]

I’m bookmarking this using a reply; someone remind me to continue reading this lol

[@user-rj3ub4fd4u]

0:33 You are right in that Old French "del" did evolve into "du", but it was not a partitive and it was not used with uncountable nouns back then. Like in most European languages and unlike modern French, the article was omitted in Old French when a noun was uncountable. So, it was sometimes impossible to determine if a sentence or clause had partitive meaning or not: "Roses avrez." - You will have (some) roses. "Pain ne mangerai." - I will not eat (any) bread. As you can see, OF also had pro-drop and the word order was quite flexible as it was an inflected language. With the object clearly indicated by the oblique case, a 12th century French speaker might have said "Lait boivent." "De" by itself did have partitive force, and was used whenever a collective whole was implied: "De nostre lait boivent li paisan." (The peasants drink some of our milk). However, "del" was a contraction of de + the demonstrative, hence it also had demonstrative force (like the modern form "du" still does in French, whenever it translates to "of the") and it would have been illogical to use it with uncountable nouns. It wasn't until the 14th century that it became a partitive and started being used with uncountable nouns.

[@prenomnom2812]

Thank you for this very interesting comment!

[@SebastianGarcia-qo7wi]

When English speakers say that french spelling is really bad are they aware that English spelling is several times worst?. French spelling is weird but is consistent enough unlike English's.

[@OmnipotentPotato]

English-speaking people have absolutely NO right to make fun of any other spelling system. French spelling, even if a bit counterintuitive, is incredibly more regular than English spelling. At least speaking French you can rest assured that any long, strange combination of mostly silent letters will always be pronounced the same way; an assurance you can never have speaking English. And I say this as someone who wholeheartedly hates France.

[@blackfowl75]

Honestly, it depends on the words. Longer groups of silent letters tend to be more consistent but if you take single units, it’s just as inconsistent as English. Granted, we don’t have trough, though, through, etc. but there are odd patterns. My favorite one is “brin” and “brun” (“strand” and “brown”) which can easily sound the same for a non native but there’s a subtle difference. Also, we have suffixes “-é”, “-et”, “-ait”, “-er”, conjugated verbs “ai”, “es”, “est” ([I] have, [you] are, [he/she/it] is), and the coordinator “et” (and) which are all pronounced the same way in France. However, in some parts of Switzerland, some are pronounced differently (which is actually closer to the older pronunciation). Another interesting thing is words containing several e’s between consonants, like “médecin” (doctor). The second “e” is silent, which is consistent everywhere AFAIK. But for a word like “genevois” (one that lives in Geneva), it’s either pronounced “juh-nvwah” or “jnuh-vwah” depending on who you ask (just in case, the “j” is pronounced like “ge” in “garage”). Hopefully you can understand what I mean lmao. Long story short: I think French is just as shitty of a language as English but in different ways.

[@DragonsAreAwesome45]

"Simplifying the pronunciation doesn't make the French people particularly lazy" Ok, who else just didn't bother with changing the spelling again?

[@veroniquejeangille8248]

The English...

[@cutefidgety]

I mean just off the bat I can think of Japanese pronouncing “desu” as “des” or Malay/Indonesian pronouncing “selalu” as “slalu”

[@Gab8riel]

​@@cutefidgetythe Japanese's hiragana is still pretty damn close to being completely phonetic

[@guilace]

⁠@@cutefidgetyThe vowels in Japanese are still pronounced they're just not always voiced

[@chuksk8592]

All languages' writing systems are at least somewhat behind or isn't perfectly representative. People love to say "Japanese kana are prefect!!!" but it's was only recentishly that they got rid of some (ofc not even all) non-representative characters and combinations (ever noticed how "えう" is so rare? It's because it most instances of it came to be pronounced "よう" and "ょう" *centuries* ago, but they only spelt it how it is now around the 1940s) and just over 100 years ago, there used to be around half-a-dozen ways to write most kana - obviously there's *way* more I'm glossing over but I've said more than enough for now lol. French spelling *will* "catch up", it's just that it being as behind as it is is not particularly bad or strange, and we can let it be for the meantime!

[@Designed1]

English spelling is like French spelling if there wasn't an entire institution telling its speakers how to "properly" spell things

[@FannomacritaireSuomi]

The archaic spellings don't suck. They give valuable information about how languages were spoken in the past.

[@joaodavid2001]

English and French spelling does.

[@gi0m298]

And who cares about that besides linguists?

[@GalaxyStudios0]

@@gi0m298 exactly. Spelling reforms are a much needed thing

[@craftah]

in most slavic languages the spelling was changed and they're phonetic now. nobody cares about archaic spellings

[@jayasuryangoral-maanyan3901]

​@@gi0m298in some cases it gives you clues on how the word will be pronounced in certain contexts. Just as h is not pronounced in french, it does affect how the word sounds in a sentence. In french especially this is quite influential given the liaison system. In irish on the other hand, you have to change how you wrote the word depending on how the words around it sound. Not necessarily bad, but a dofferent approach

[@FebruaryHas30Days]

And then we have phonetic languages, like Hindi, Tamil and Indonesian.

[@hadhamalnam]

Hindi is good with it's consonants but it deletes vowels and vowels can also change based on their surroundings. Tamil I think is basically perfectly phonetic after you apply some to rules to how consonants are voiced and devoiced. But the reason why some languages are more phonetic than others is because they either don't have as long of a continuous literary history or they underwent relatively recent spelling reforms. As the video says, languages like English and French were once phonetic, but since they had a strong, continuous literary history since like a thousand years ago, spellings become sort set in stone. The old spellings carry more prestige and changing would also make it harder for everyone to read old texts. You can see this in the case of French, changent could be changed to shanj to be more accurate, but few would support that change because it looks weird and because it only actually helps foreign people pronounce French words, because for French speakers, they already know the rules of French spelling so for them the old spelling is still phonetic.

[@gillianomotoso328]

Spanish y’all!

[@FebruaryHas30Days]

@@gillianomotoso328 Do you pronounce the "q", "u", "e" in "que"? Is it pronounced as if it were written "قوي" in Arabic?

[@gillianomotoso328]

@@FebruaryHas30Days qu is a digraph. It’s pronounced “keh”. Though admittedly, q would be pronounced the same as qu is, so the u is a redundant letter.

[@FebruaryHas30Days]

@@gillianomotoso328 Indonesian has a digraph "ng", but the "n" and the "g" seem to blend well. Do you think your Spanish "q" can make a sound of its own without copying the other letters? If not, don't consider Spanish as a phonetic language.

[@cma1676]

As a french person, who is also a french teacher, I approve of changing the spelling.

[@alexandernoe1619]

Well, changing aigu -> aiguë to aigüe was not *that* much of an improvement 😂

[@xjmmjbnqfstjdijoj2044]

Il boivent del lait (pronounced as it is spelled) sounds way closer to the Italian translation "bevono del latte" Today's French sounds like "I(l) bwav dü lè"

[@HandyMan125]

nah, still not convinced that it is a good change, look at what they did to my boi eggs!

[@slipperywhale2167]

oof

[@user-lm7ir9eh4k]

Eœufs

[@plasmuds_]

eurfs

[@vpvnsf]

What about eau?

[@abarette_]

@@vpvnsf au is absolutely always pronounced /o/ though. The only "weird" thing about eau is the initial e being silent. Though that is absolutely consistent. eau is absolutely always pronounced /o/. Whether that's in seau, peaufiner, agneaux, etc. quite frankly French does need a standalone letter for silent e. It's only because romance languages are so dead-set on keeping A-Z and no adding letters, that we don't have one.

[@galaxydave3807]

0:33 Are there more people who hear /lajtja/ instead of /lajt/?

[@TheWanderingNight]

He kept enunciating as he was coming off that palatalised alveolar 😅 in his defence, it's not an easy sound to make in final position!

[@keylime6]

Honestly english's historical spelling might be worse

[@humanteneleven]

I was just about to link the video I made on English spelling, and then I realized I only posted it on TikTok and never on KZbin 😅 so I’ll def post that one soon!! If I still have the vid saved somewhere…

[@dyld921]

​@@humantenelevenI think you did post it. Is it the "why is English spelling so weird" video?

[@carltomacruz9138]

Let's make French make sense. #BringBackMiddleFrench

[@tony757]

I mean the whole “easier” thing is ironically how tonal languages got their tones in the first place.

[@tim.a.k.mertens]

This process is always something to keep in mind when you start to hear a lot people saying things "incorrectly", it's not wrong, it's just new

[@skilfularcher]

If your making conlangs this is important to remember, when was the most recent writing system reform, all the changes since then will likely not be in line with the way the words are written

[@TheWanderingNight]

Written Irish, Danish and Tibetan are also notoriously conversative in keeping letters that historical sound changes have left in the dust. Also, Chinese pictograms might get a bad rap for being difficult to learn, but at least they are (in theory) immune to this problem.

[@karaqakkzl]

because pictogram writing picture, not sound

[@talideon]

Irish mostly got rid of its silent letters half a century ago. It's a subject of debate as to whether how this was done was necessarily good as it went too far in some spots. The spelling system, however, is essentially the same one as that is Old Irish, albeit with explicit marking of lenition and extra marking of palatalisation.

[@TheParadiseParadox]

that's interesting. it does explain a little of how liason works. I thought it was so strange that you would omit a sound, still spell it as if it has that sound... and then in specific contexts include the sound it makes much more sense now I know they used to pronounce all the sounds and some got dropped also, I think the word "comfortable" is relevant. so rarely spelt with an apostrophe

[@russell_w21]

The title and the intro was simply hilarious in my opinion hahaha

[@sigmasabra862]

Some "silent letters" were deliberately added by the scribes for etymology..the same with english.

[@Yassinius]

You're completely right, other languages do this too, though French is a major culprit still lol. In Dutch, main dialect speakers usually don't say the letter 'n' at the end of a verb, like in 'werken', 'spelen', 'praten'. Instead these words are usually pronounced as 'werkuh', 'speluh', and 'pratuh' because it's easier.

[@grandsome1]

They've been saying that they wanted to reform the spelling for 200 years but barely got to it, they only fixed the most archaic everyday inconsistency like clef/clé.

[@sebastiangudino9377]

What i find pretty astonishing is that Spanish in general HASN'T changed much since the XIII century. Our spelling is pretty similar to what we have back then. And while spanish dialect DO have very distinct pronunciation, and he have phasef out a lot of vocabulary, the general phonetics of the standard language have changed shockingly little. It is a VERY conservative language

[@andreeacat7071]

Maybe when they were conquering most of south america they ended up creating some kind of ruleset to teach the natives there spanish and that became what they taught everyone spanish from and then bam linguistic drift is limited

[@sebastiangudino9377]

@@andreeacat7071 I mean, yeah, but it is more like a very interesting case of subtle diglossia. Nobody speaks "standard spanish" (Not even people in Spain, since vosotros and it's conjugation is not considered standard spanish) day to day. But we are all able to produce it and understand it. Not a single Spanish speaker would consider it a "separate language". But who knows. Maybe in like a century or two Spanish will be like Arabic, with very very distinct local dialects and a very formal standar language which is pretty distinct from how people actual talk

[@paper2222]

also the rae happened

[@sebastiangudino9377]

@@paper2222 Yeah, but then again, the RAE has proven they cannot stop the progress of language. Then can say "Hey, the correct form of the past participle of imprimir is impreso, not imprimido". But then people will just ignore it and keep speaking how they want, to which the RAE would then follow with "Actually, both ways are accepted" They currently don't really regulate the language, but rather describe it. Which is honestly a lot less dictatorial (The RAE has a troubled past) But yeah, having a strong regulatory entity was very fundamental for the language during the XV to XIX century

[@talideon]

Oh, Spanish has changed _plenty_ since the 13th century! It's just that the spellings haven't needed to adapt. Linguriosa did a video on the pronunciation of Old Spanish a while back, using El Cid as an example, and it's well worth a watch.

[@coinyfrombfdireal]

Pov: its 3099 and "oo oo aa aa" is spelled as "anticonstitutionnellement"

[@someguy9133]

im dying

[@coinyfrombfdireal]

@@someguy9133 you would be dead actually

[@swedneck]

mmm, monke

[@Kpracn0va]

I’ve spoken French since I was a child and I wished we just changed the spelling of words. We have 2 letters that are pronounced “eh” yet we barely use them, opting for letter combinations.

[@diulikadikaday]

In English “naa mean?” is the shortened form of “do you know what I mean?”

[@ErezakUwU]

Reminds me of the Polish word for pulp: "miąższ" /mʲjɔ̃w̃ʃ/ while it should be pronounced /mʲjɔ̃w̃ʒˈʃ/. Although pronouncing it the first way doesn't brake my tounge; but also seeing my classmates trying to write it, or just reading Polish literature with all those old and forgotten words and spellings hits different

[@pierre29484]

Babe, wake up. New human1011 video just dropped

[@dontlookdontask]

Just woke up, perfect.

[@vitormelomedeiros]

long short is an insane concept lmao why does youtube restrict it to 60 seconds it makes no seeeeense

[@daSrilankanCat]

As a tamil speaker in germany, i learned the old tamil language just to see how the people might have spoken it 5000 years ago, and the alphabet looked VERY VERY VERY DIFFERENT from the modern, it looks like modern tamazight for some reason

[@KertPerteson]

I love linguistics stuff😊

[@GameFuMaster]

lol the ending about english, kinda true, though we still can often sound out most words I feel

[@veroniquejeangille8248]

Really? Have you ever realized that "ough" can be pronounced in 7 or 8 different ways? And how do you know which letters are sounded and which are silent? There's just no way to guess how to pronounce a word that you don't know...

[@Drogobo]

this is the law of entropy

[@xolang]

Acadian French down north in Canada actually still pronounce the -ent, although it sounds more like -ont in their case. i changeont

[@mimzim7141]

Sounds like french patois

[@Gotsyn]

Fun fact: “obscur” and “obscurité” used to be spelled and pronounced as “oscur” and “oscurité”, but etymologists added a “b” to reflect its latin roots, which influenced the pronunciation. I hate etymologists

[@XxCastlegirl_07xX]

English did this too with words that start with a silent k. Knock, knife, knee, all used to have a k sound.

[@abarette_]

see this I can get behind, pronouncing /kn/ at the start of a word sounds like aids

[@doctormystery6264]

Francophone here, it's not "ils bivent del lait" it's "ils boivent du lait"

[@humanteneleven]

… isn’t that what I said 😅

[@mochikitten745]

i think they mean "del" vs du" but @doctormystery6264 i think its an old french vs new french word@@humanteneleven

[@Yolwoocle]

...because it's old french ? It's literally the whole point of the video

[@juch3]

Bro you need to watch the video again

[@humanteneleven]

Ah yeah del in old French became du. You’ll also notice that the 3rd person masculine plural used to be « il » not « ils »

[@luciepiriou4678]

I'm a French speaker n I think that it has to do something when France was divided into two sections who spoke differently : oil n oc. From there the French speaks more vulgarly n I when these both sections reunited, I think that it has something to do with how we speak the French today. But I could be wrong cuz I don't know it any further so if anyone wants to correct me then I welcome u too 🤗

[@TheWanderingNight]

The sound changes he described are kind of specific to the langues d'oïl, like Norman and Parisian French. The langues d'oc didn't reunite with the langues d'oïl so much as get almost completely wiped out by them with gradual forced assimilation to the Parisian standard.

[@DylanDoesStuff1]

English be out here with “forecastle”

[@scribbles3721]

underrated

[@HanzCastroyearsago]

lol its like the way I say ‘can I have’ over time I said it so many times that it evolved from can i have can’ave c’ave which is pronounced smth like kev

[@rtperrett]

Are you telling me that French use to sound like Portuguese?

[@adanactnomew7085]

My question is, if languages like to simplify their pronunciation, how was it more complicated in the first place.

[@loicrodriguez2532]

Languages just naturally change from generation to generation, but that doesn't mean the result is more or less complex overall, thats a misconception. Latin isn't fundamentally more or less difficult & complex than Romanian, or than Finnish : it just depends on your own mother-tongue, on the context, & on the content of the conversation. Yes, people tend to change their utterances to be as efficient & effective (with as little effort) as possible, but they still have to reach their full communicative goals, & their peception of “speaking effort” depends on what language they learned to speak when they were little.

[@raindeer9787]

I don't blame French, because English is a trainwreck with its spelling and pronunciation xD

[@Vesperfelis]

I think, other than English, Danish is another language that has fallen victim to its orthography reflecting old Danish pronunciation rather than modern Danish pronunciation. Some famous words I think of are: (I’m gonna use the L to represent the soft D because that’s what it sounds like to non Danish speakers) Havde pronounced like hell Noget pronounced like null Nogle pronounced like known Af pronounced like é Meget pronounced like mall Morgen pronounced like morn

[@kimdavis2433]

So like how we don't say "kuh-nife" anymore for "knife."

[@Lord_Marquaad]

So how is Indonesian is so painfully simple and consistent in spelling and pronunciation. I feel like for how much language influencing it, things like this should have happened.

[@EllieK_814]

Indonesian (and Malay) underwent spelling reform in 1975, previously it used a Dutch based orthography.

[@Syumza]

But there are some inconsistencies too like having three pronunciations as in "kereta" /kə.re.ta/ and "e-mel" /i.mel/ so we have homographs like "pêrang" and "pérang", and "membêla" and "membéla". Also spelling of English loanwords is different from their common (borrowed) pronunciation like "teknologi" /tek.no.lo.dʒi/ and "bank" /beŋ(k)/ (but in formal situations, the words are usually pronounced phonetically so "bank" is /baŋk/ which sounds weird). Plus, there is no distinction between vowel glide and vowel hiatus like the 's in "meraikan" /mə.ra.i.kan/ and "melambai" /mə.lam.baj/ are pronounced differently. All these inconsistencies have made confusions among children who are still learning the language and foreign learner so I think another spelling reform for Indomalay would be good.

[@zenrythebard5587]

@@Syumza I'd argue that the inconsistent e in "kereta" isn't an inconsistency at all, it's just how subsequent e's are naturally pronounced in non-loan Indonesian words (not counting words with prefixes like ke-, per-, etc.). Kereta, Jendela, Pendeta, Gereja, and so on. The only words that I can think of that don't follow this e-é pattern are loan words (televisi, which is é-e, but I've also heard é-é) and words with prefixes (kekebalan, which is e-e). Of course they could always just follow Sundanese and differentiate the two symbols, but then again not every group pronounces these words in the same way.

[@Ryan-cb1ei]

My guess, which is also based off how British English used to sound VS how it does now, is that it’s a classist thing. Upperclass changes how they speak to distinguish themselves, and it catches on and changes the spoken language

[@audreydupuy2628]

France is trying to simplify spelling. The French Academy now allows the spelling Onion instead of Ognion.

[@ANCalias]

Nope Ognon insted of Oignon

[@audreydupuy2628]

@@ANCalias oh yeah, I thought it looked off. Thanks for rectifying 😁

[@prosto.philya]

I'm mesmerized not only by the amout of recearch you've done, but also by the fact how beautiful you are (forgive me my fanboy-ing). Thank you for entertaining all the language nerds out there and I wish the best for you and your channel

[@drnanard9605]

There are many misconceptions in this video, and frankly, misinformation. Old French isn't a language. It's a bunch of languages, what we call langues d'oïl (Oïl languages). Each language had its own pronunciation, and there was no fixed graphy for words, so saying "this is how it was pronounced" and showing one graphy and claiming it is "old French" is just plain wrong. On a side note, the -ent ending in verbs was always silent, as it comes from the Latin -ant, which was unstressed and had already lost its pronunciation in vulgar latin. It was silent BEFORE becoming French.

[@bootmii98]

Spanish pronounces -an/-en, and Italian pronounces -no. So clearly it was still pronounced in the VL period, or at least the was.

[@matteo-ciaramitaro]

honestly I think focusing on the difference between a group of mutually intellgible dialects and a language is pedantic. they're basically the same thing. The word language already allows for multiple pronunciations and orthographies of the dialects within it.

[@Valentin-oc5nh]

in german they constantly update spelling to simplify and make it consistent.. french is just extrac

[@tims1407]

If French (and based on your other video, English too) are changing to make words easier to say, and it sounds like you say all languages do this, does that mean languages are getting less complex? I guess I’m confused as to why they *were* so complex to begin with, if all languages move towards lower complexity? Or is it that languages in large, integrated societies with lots of non native speakers move to decrease in complexity while languages in prehistorical societies moved to become more complex?

[@loicrodriguez2532]

Languages just naturally change from generation to generation, but that doesn't mean the result is more or less complex overall, thats a misconception. Latin isn't fundamentally more or less difficult & complex than Romanian, or than Finnish : it just depends on your own mother-tongue, on the context, & on the content of the conversation. Yes, people tend to change their utterances to be as efficient & effective (with as little effort) as possible, but they still have to reach their full communicative goals, & their peception of “speaking effort” depends on what language they learned to speak when they were little.

[@JudyofJudyland]

Why do most French words have silent letters, but only like 50% of English words do?

[@nikolatesla708]

How do you know how they used to pronounce it?

[@alexfsans]

Como se o inglês fosse tão mais racional... 😂😂

[@urquizabr]

Any source to backup your statement?

[@mattybrunolucaszeneresalas9072]

0:39 not really . Still happening? Sure

[@aguitarrist1096]

Ch is pronounced sh in many languages, portuguese for example.

[@nobodyanon]

Like Japanese dropping some u/i sounds? Like in desu, ~masu, sukoshi, suki, etc.

[@tutuanimacoes6220]

He made beaw turn into bē-æ-wa

[@jinushaun]

Thai enters the chat

[@davidfinder291]

Sounds like Italian

[@amperni]

I don't think this happen in all languages, it didn't happen in arabic

[@no_name4796]

in italian instead, basically every word is pronounced literally the same as it's spelled (with very few excpetions, and excluding foreign words)

[@Enrico-]

it's not though, you just don't notice it

[@andreeacat7071]

lasagna

[@felicepompa938]

​@@Enrico-It definitely is. Some sound like "k" and hard g simply evolved to be written down as "ch" and "gh". Most letter clusters serve a particular sound "gli" "gn"... Like the spanish tilded N is there to signal a particular sound (gn in Italian, nh in occitan for example, vergonha is pretty much pronounced like in standard Italian, If you manager to find an occitan native without a french accent, but its not)

[@frenchertoast]

If it's "just easier to say", then why was old french hard to pronounce to begin with? More generally: if there's a constant trend towards phonetic simplicity across languages, then how did phonetic complexity ever arise in the first place?

[@pawel198812]

Basically, simple vowels in Latin changed in various ways based on stress, position, and surrounding consonants. Later, they were 'smoothed' into new simple vowels while many consonants in coda position were dropped and only reappear at liaison. Occitan, in comparison, is much more conservative in terms of vowels and still uses diphthongs and triphthongs where French has simple vowels (sometimes preceded or followed by a very distinct and audible ou-, u- or y-sound.

[@viperking6573]

Yeah I also don't understand the "it's easier to say" thing, because especially in Romance some grammatical aspects actually got more complex ( slowly used to be LENTE, now everyone except Sardinian that I know added -mente making it LENTAMENTE, which is clearly longer and more complex ). I suspect it has more to do with specific sociolects becoming imitated by everyone because of many different reasons, social ones maybe, or different ones surviving. The easiest language for a native speaker is their own so /bo/ would have made no sense to a M. French speaker 😂 /bju/ is simpler than /bjutiful/ but we just don't say that

[@abarette_]

@@viperking6573 LENTE means slow. LENTAMENTE means slowly. And in French, despite being spelled nearly the same, is 50% shorter in amount of syllables LENTE (slow) -> /len.te/, 2 syllables LENTAMENTE (slowly) -> /len.ta.men.te/, 4 syllables lent (slow, masculine) -> /lɑ̃/, 1 syllable lente (slow, feminine) -> /lɑ̃t/, 1 syllable lentement (slowly) -> /lɑ̃t.mɑ̃/, 2 syllables

[@viperking6573]

@@abarette_ in Latin, LENTU(M) meant slow, LENTE meant slowly. I meant Latin not French! I was pointing out, that instead of sticking to the shorter LENTE in Latin, French ( and almost all romance speeches ) switched to adding the suffix -MENTE

[@abarette_]

@@viperking6573 thing is that cases died in most romance languages, so the simpler forms were retained. lent(a/e/i/o) for slow in that case. although lentamente is longer, it is clearer in a caseless language. The point of the French comparison was that its pronounciation got re-simplified over time. Very interestingly, Romanian, a caseful romance language, slow and slowly are both lent. But that word is an exception.

[@nathanielmartins5930]

Pronouncing Beau as "Béawa" really reminds you that French and Spanish are related.

[@chingizzhylkybayev8575]

Really? To me it sounded like a Germanic language from Roman times lol

[@nathanielmartins5930]

@chingizzhylkybayev8575 Mostly the "awa" part since it sounds like "Agua" if you drop the g. But you are right since they both come from the Latin Aqua.

[@chingizzhylkybayev8575]

@@nathanielmartins5930 I guess it didn't sound Spanish to me because while there are plenty of words in Spanish ending in -ua, I don't think there are any ending in -au. That, to me, is a German territory lol. Like blau or Frau or Spandau.

[@rhythmmandal3377]

mate no language respells their word. My language had it's last update 200 years ago where they were like we have contrast between glides and just diphthongs right? just a symbol for it.

[@eb.3764]

you sound like a sesame street character

[@arkhandhwr]

How do we *know*? Like, it could be the English and French just playing one huge trick on everyone going "sure, we used to pronounce it with all these letters but now we don't" when they could've just invented nonsense spelling for fun

[@kjl3080]

Comparative method, poetry and people back then complaining about pronounciation

[@cerebrummaximus3762]

There's nothing I find more hilarious than an English speaker making fun of French spelling, when 80% of French spelling is very systematic, with only 20% exceptions - meanwhile English is more like 20% exceptions again but 80% is full chaos, no rules, no system. There's an old joke in linguistics: How do read out "ghoti" in English? Yep, you guessed it: it's "fish" - 'gh' in 'rough', 'o' in 'women', and 'ti' in 'fiction'.

[@HandyMan125]

there is one for church too

[@penguinlim]

@@HandyMan125 tolot, I believe (t from picture, olo from colonel, t from picture). these kinds of spellings are fun but they are quite misleading when taken out of context.

[@HandyMan125]

@@penguinlim does dgirdg also count? dg in badge, i in birch,

[@uamdbro]

A variation of this comment is made every time this topic comes up, and as needs to be pointed out every time: individual English speakers are not personally responsible for English orthography, so I have no idea how you can think English having worse spelling than French and English speakers criticizing French spelling are in any way in contradiction.

[@Wowzersepic]

I don't really like the ghoti joke because it just doesnt really work Like what word starts with gh and makes a f sound I get it, but i think english has a bit more form than some think I do think it could be alot better though

[@AthanasiosJapan]

Greek has the same peculiarity. For example, AI in modern Greek is pronunced E. However in Greek, the pronunciation is totally predictable from the spelling.

[@artemesiagentileschini7348]

Uhmmm sound changes are not actually that common in many Austronesian languages. In fact, many Philippine languages are so conservative phonetically reconstructed proto-austronesian looks like a Philippine language. A lot of Philippine languages change lexically and grammatically/phonemically vs Indo-Europeans with more frequent sound changes. Heck, aside from consonant reductions Hawaiian, Maori and/or chamorro sounds exactly like some Taiwanese languages. It is like Middle English vs Modern English kind of sound change, minimal and not drastic. This is the reason why most Austronesian languages retain "lima" and "mata" as the word for 5 and eye across languages.

[@josiahsaquiton8261]

Actually, they are There are cognates in Austronesian languages with very different consonants Eg. Tagalog “bahay" vs Cebuano “balay" And there's plenty of examples

[@artemesiagentileschini7348]

@@josiahsaquiton8261 I know that, but relative to Indo-European languages, Philippine languages are so conservative and to an extent Austronesian languages. I just stated it on my comment.

[@ahmetkanati]

french spelling might be wasteful letterwise but it's much more consistent in pronunciation than english!!

[@masterm95]

The process has never happened in Arabic though

[@humanteneleven]

Not true! Tanween for instance

[@FakenameStevens]

They didn't have an excuse not to change the spelling. Spain is right next to France and the only letter they don't pronounce is the u after q

[@Ryan-cb1ei]

I feel like the French decided to be “posh” like the British and that’s how the way they spoke changed

[@annetnt83]

so your telling me french can sound even more weird than it already is? 😮‍💨

[@oumaima353]

"Happens in every language but they respell the language accordingly" Arabs pronouncing everything so differently they created different dialects: all hail spoken culture! Words shall not be written! 😂 litteraly couldn't write arabic dialects before the age of social media 😂 because it breaks all the arabic rules that we learnt in school for years! I remember as a kid we never, ever wrote what we spoke. Instead, we used classical arabic as in litteral sentence structure, grammar and vocabulary, instead of what we would normally say. It was seen as a shameful act of ignorance and illiteracy to write in dialect! The language changed alright, but as long as we didn't write it, it didn't need to be re-written 🧠💯

[@Appolodelphi]

It was kind of ugly though 😭😭😭

[@jivkoyanchev1998]

This does explain the situation, but not really. Languages do change in time, and mostly that's focused on simplification, but that's not the case with French. With French, it's moreover the mix between a form of Vulgar Latin + radical vowel and consonant shifts + the sheer stubbornness of the French themselves. I will give an example with my own mother tongue. Bulgarian has been written in the Cyrillic alphabet since the IX century, and if now you now give a modern speaker of the language a sample of Old Bulgaira, he would still be able to read and probably pronounce it fairly correctly. Languages do simplify over time, but for French simplification is not the main reason.

[@amaeliss7827]

There is also a complication about french which is that spelling WAS actually changed/codified in the 19th century, to make it MORE complicated, on purpose, as a classist thing. I'm not joking. Your french accent is really good btw

[@Ryan-cb1ei]

So they basically did what the British did, the upperclass changed the way they spoke to stand out, and it permanently changed the language, for the worse…

[@amaeliss7827]

@@Ryan-cb1ei not really because the upper class changed the way they talked to be fancy but as far as I'm aware it was a gradual decision that evolved naturally, not, like, a bunch of assholes sat in a room one day and changed the rules specifically to confuse the poor?

[@mattybrunolucaszeneresalas9072]

Slow down brother. 1:11 that’s not real and English spelling is fine

[@marolibez]

Modern French spelling does make sense: there's a simple set of rules and conventions which allows you to pronounce up to 90% of French vocabulary if they are correctly followed. Rien de plus, rien de moins. Anyone could pronounce a new word from the first try. English spelling, on the other hand, is a completely random nightmare of hypercorrections and etymological nonsense. The entire concept of spelling bees is quite idiotic.

[@enkor9591]

It doesn't at all look like it should be pronounced /tʃandʒent/, English isn't the only language in the world and its spelling conventions aren't objectively better

[@fantomebambou]

Its still shi 😭 i hate my language

[@yourfriendlygestapo5925]

There is also the influence that french was a language for the elite and in order to separate themseleves from the poorer classes they made the language more complicated

[@hahafunny988]

Pounce and spelling doesn't match😂

[@espartaco2028]

I´m solely interested in Spanish but, from that vantage point of Spanish being modern Latin, and French «used to» is it historically accurate that Luix XIV was the single most responsible for changing the French language pronunciation to become most pleasing in sound? I don´t know why I believe this and would like correction if that is not the case.

[@loicrodriguez2532]

Louis XIV didn't do anything to the pronounciation of French. Every language is constantly changing. It's not always perceptible in a life time, but it can end up creating radical differences.