Their only task (assigned by a minister of Louis XIV) is to write a dictionary, which they do... once a century. Technically, they don't have the power to decide how we should write and speak, but, hey, traditions!
We cannot understand each other over 20% at most while speaking without having had each other's language classes. You are high likely refering to written understanding only. What is french aspiré btw
@user-vo9wd6tx6c highly unlikely. Limburgish is a really small language to have such an overt influence on French of all things, and some dialects of French are spoken quite far away from anywhere Limburgish is spoken. No this is more just what languages do. They change, they lost stuff. The only reason it's particularly notable in French is because similar to English and Danish the orthography was frozen more or less in place before a number of sound changes which obscured it. All the Romance languages have changed a lot, and many in quite complex ways, it's just that French has done so the most. It's not particular unique in that it has such losses, only in how much has in fact been lost
Exactly. The degeneration of French pronunciation is mainly due to the fact that it's very old. Much older than English. Chinese languages have a similar history, originally being much richer in syllables. Chinese speakers compensated this loss with tones, and French speakers didn't. Not even pitch accent like in Japanese.
Pronouncing silent final e as a schwa just gave him a southern accent lol I tought pronouncing every letter would make it a mess, but it's actually pretty easy to understand, it just sounds like a regional speech
I thought the same, when the English speaker was reading it out, I understood nothing, but when the French speaker was reading, I was thinking "oh, still French but we've just gone south"
as a french speaker, watching the first part of the video was like "wtf, this sounds very weird" but after watching the part where the french native spoke "français aspiré", this became quite clear and actually pretty pleasant to hear
Any change made to French can't make it worse than it already is. If French was pronounced closer to it's spelling, it would be a somewhat normal language
@@ararune3734haha what's a normal language ? 😅 Considering that there are 7000 languages spoken on earth, I don't think French or even English for that matter are the weirdest ones
As a French person, my first thought at 5:44 was "wait, now you can't tell it apart from the feminine version" but then I remembered that your cursed version of French re-introduced word-final schwa.
@k.r.a.k.iI live in southern France, both schwas in "grande amie" are silent in this context. The schwa can rearise in some contexts (including "grande" in isolation, [gʁɑ̃d] > [ˈgʁandə]) but we wouldn't pronounce the schwa right before or after another vowel, except maybe in poetry for meter reasons, but that wouldn't be accent-specific.
@@Niclaas1999Yeah, silent vs. aspirated H is one of the weirdest things about French. Technically both are silent, but the aspirated H still has an effect on pronunciation by preventing liaison. Meanwhile words like homme could lose their H and nothing would change, it's really just a leftover from Latin that hasn't been pronounced in over a millennium.
That's pretty much like modern French now! I have no idea how the hell anybody understands each other in spoken speech without subtitles, the language is so plagued with homophones! I know, yeah . . . yeah, context! 😂
Pronounce only the first letter of every word. So simplify, each letter is pronounced like "hon" in current French. So, no change really, as far as I can see.
@@Banom7a They learned latin correctly they just spoke it with their own accent which caused it to change over time differently than other latin dialects.
It really just sounds like a strong regional accent to my French ears. But the pronounced "s" at the end of plural makes French sounds very hissing, haha.
Spanish does pronounce every s sound and does sound hissing. Sure, some dialects (like Caribbean, Andalusian, Argentinean, Chilean...) aspirate s sounds, but other accents (particularly Mexican accents) do tend to pronounce all 's' sounds making a lot of hiss sounds.
@@TheJosman Spanish [s] sound is a little more farther in the mouth than a typical French or English one, making it less hissing. It's called the "voiceless apico-alveolar sibilant".
English & French: The spelling is historic and the modern pronunciation doesn't match. Polish, German, Spanish, Italian etc: pronounce words how it's spelt. Danish:.....
I think the reason Danish and not other scandinavian languages sounds weird is because Denmark has been invaded by France and whoever the ruler of France was at the timw wanted to make Danish like French.
@@thatoddshade Yeah, no. While Napoleon did exert a lot of control over Denmark, he didn't rule it, and I'm not aware of any time that any French monarch has ruled in Denmark. That's also not enough to explain the sound changes in Danish vs Norwegian Bokmål and all the other crazy things Danish does that have absolutely no relation to anything in French.
@@ibnenkigalileo9256 it’s just that in French it’s a one way map of orthography to pronunciation, and given a particular pronunciation there could be a dozen ways to spell it and there isn’t any systemic way to know. This is an even worse problem with English since English doesn’t even map cleanly one way.
The e at the end sound just like a southerner, but the -s are crazy. Also I think qu and gu and ge was a mistake, I'd argue they are not silent, just a digraph
fair for gu since it avoids /ʒ/, but the u in qu is pretty much useless given all words with q have u right after (except the rare word-final q), not to mention exceptions like aquarium
In college our professor was from the south of france and we didnt find out until after the midterm that our class struggled with the parisian-spoken listening portion because we had all developed not only an accent but an ear for the accent lmao
@@truesoundchrisYou mean isolated, right? Because in Spanish and Portuguese it can be just /k/ as well when combined with e and i (e.g. que, aqui, quem, querer, química, etc.)
Yeah. I think that was the biggest giveaway that he probably just thought this up without consulting very many Romance or French speakers, because that is a massive gap when it comes to being able to have the soft and hard arrangement for the g, gu, c, ç, and qu arrangements before e and i vs before the other vowels
Thats what happens when you undo sound changes. Its the case if you go far back to. Latin gets reks from PIE hregs, notice how its still a g in regnant.
Really? Just think of the words "et" and "sept" which sound in Italian ("e", "sette") and in Spanish ("y", "siete") much like in French. As a consequence, one should rather drop some letters that aren't pronounced any more from the spelling instead of pronouncing them. Still, I definitely do not advocate dropping the final "s" indicating the plural or the "e" in the feminine forms!
@@WK-5775 True but most of our words have undergone so many changes that they've become barely recognizable to other Romance speakers. Verre vs vidrio, chaud vs caldo, yeux vs occhi,... Just to name a few. They're related but to an untrained eye they look like they derive from completely different roots. As for the s thing, it's even worse when you consider the plural of words in "al" (cheval) which ends in "aux" but pronounced o (chevaux/chevo), the x was never pronounced in the first place but was easier for scribal monks to write
@@oliveranderson7264 French is ok as it is, imo, and one can deduce the pronunciation of (most of) the words from their spelling - if one knows the rules. This is far better than in English, where there are more exceptions than rules, cf. the famous "ghoti". As to the issue with the "x" in the plural, I was aware of that. One can't change the fact that the plural of "cheval" is "chevaux", so how should one spell that? "Chevo" would be completely irregular, even if there were "travo" and "matério" too. "Chevaus" would be ok, along with "châteaus" etc., if needed. But that wouldn't make things easier, after all. And the solution "à l'anglaise", writing "chevals" and pronouncing "chevaux", would mess things up completely.
''real french'' taught in most french courses is just parisian french. This is like southern accents in france. I even had a teacher tell us that if we wanted, we could roll the R, since there's many french accents that do it.
this is not quite like old French, old French has the same heavy liaisons but some sounds are completely different, like Francais would be pronounced Franswé and you would roll the R. It's closer to the Quebecquer accent or joual.
@@St-benoit I know, he said in the video this is not like old French. Reread my comment. I said 'it', it being the version of French lingo lizard made in this video, sounds slightly better than real French. Then I said Old French is actually not painful to hear, in contrast to the previous two types of French mentioned. And yes, I have heard Old French.
@@answerman9933 Untrue. Most words with silent k are from Old English (knee, knight), as are words with silent w (whole, sword, answer), silent t (listen, wrestle), etc.
UGH YEAHHH IT LITERALLY SOUNDS WAY BETTER THAN MODERN DRENCH. But Im not even french I have french friends tho so I think I would know something about how people speak frenxg bormally
honestly this sounded more normal than i expected lol. the french do pronounce stuff in songs that wouldn't be pronounced otherwise, if it helps it fit the rhythm better, or at least they used to. made the listening sections of my french phonology exams more difficult
I already made a 10 minute video showcasing what I think when I write over 4 years ago. Teenage me was just worse at linguistics and the production value is 0 as I made it for my friends not any bigger audiance.
@@Ennocb I think it is the same thing that happened in Spanish "huevo": old typewriters would have written those words "VEVO", "ueuo", "VIT" (or "VICT"), "uit" (or "uict"), so adding an "h" makes clear that you're supposed to use the semivowel "u" sound, not a "v" sound. Otherwise, you would have pronounced them the equivalent of "vevo"/"bevo" and "vit" (or "vict") respectively
@@grobbelaarthibaud les [le], amis [ami], les amis [le‿zami]; est [ɛ], belle [bɛl], la fille est très belle [la fij ɛ‿tʁɛ bɛl] [ɛ‿ʒ ʁɛzɔ̃]? (ai-je raison?)
It actually sounds like Baroque French for theatre and opera, which is good. Some remnants here and there in older versions of La Marseillaise or Edith Piaf's songs...
Isn't that just Old and Middle French with funky grammar and pronunciation? As a Bengali, considering that compared to its Indo Aryan cousins, Bengali (and other Eastern Indo Aryan languages like Odia and Assamese) has gone through some extra sound changes kind of like French (although not to the same extent and also some of the other equally extreme sound changes in other Indo Aryan languages are masked by a degree of Sanskritization through tatsamas), I wonder how pronouncing all letters in Bengali worsa like their Sanskrit equivalents would make it sound to speakers of non Eastern Indo Aryan languages. Perhaps someone should try it sometime.
@@mottom2657 হ্যাঁ এবং না। কয়েক জিনিসে ওড়িয়া উচ্চারণ তার বানানের সাথে অবশ্যই বাংলার চেয়ে আরো মেলে, তবুও যেহেতু দুটোই পূর্ব আর্য ভাষা সেইজন্য তাদের ঐতিহাসিক ধ্বনি-পরিবর্তন মোটামুটি একই রকম। যেমন ধরুন সংস্কৃতের অনেক যুক্তব্যঞ্জন দ্বিরুক্ত হয়ে যায় শব্দের শেষে বা মাঝখানে আর শব্দের প্রথমে শুধুমাত্র একটা ব্যঞ্জন হয়ে যায়। অবশ্য এমন নয় যে হিন্দির ইতিহাসে এরকম পরিবর্তন নেই। ধরুন সংস্কৃতের "ক্ষেত্র" (kṣetra) এখন দুই ভাষাতেই "খেত/ক্ষেত" (khet) হয়েছে কিন্ত সংস্কৃতের তৎসমটি হিন্দিতে সংস্কৃতের মতনই উচ্চারণ হয় আর বাংলায় উচ্চারণ হয় "khetro"। মূল পরিবর্তনগুলো প্রধান আর্যভাষাগুলিতে একই রকম, শুধু তৎসমর উচ্চারণ আলাদা। তবু তাদের নিজস্ব প্রাকৃত রূপে দেখবেন যে ট্রেন্ড একই রকম। আমি যেটা বলছি সেটা হচ্ছে যে বাংলা লেখায় প্রত্যেক ব্যঞ্জন এবং স্বরবর্ণের উচ্চারণ তার সাথে মিলছে এমন সংস্কৃত অক্ষরের মতো হবে। তার মানে স্বরবর্ণগুলি সংস্কৃত বা হিন্দির মতোই উচ্চারিত হবে। আর যুক্ত এবং লুপ্ত ব্যঞ্জনগুলোও সংস্কৃতের মতো উচ্চারিত হবে। সেইটাই করে দেখতে চাই আমি।
@@mottom2657 @mottom2657 হ্যাঁ এবং না। কয়েক জিনিসে ওড়িয়া উচ্চারণ তার বানানের সাথে অবশ্যই বাংলার চেয়ে আরো মেলে, তবুও যেহেতু দুটোই পূর্ব আর্য ভাষা সেইজন্য তাদের ঐতিহাসিক ধ্বনি-পরিবর্তন মোটামুটি একই রকম। যেমন ধরুন সংস্কৃতের অনেক যুক্তব্যঞ্জন দ্বিরুক্ত হয়ে যায় শব্দের শেষে বা মাঝখানে আর শব্দের প্রথমে শুধুমাত্র একটা ব্যঞ্জন হয়ে যায়। অবশ্য এমন নয় যে হিন্দির ইতিহাসে এরকম পরিবর্তন নেই। ধরুন সংস্কৃতের "ক্ষেত্র" (kṣetra) এখন দুই ভাষাতেই "খেত/ক্ষেত" (khet) হয়েছে কিন্ত সংস্কৃতের তৎসমটি হিন্দিতে সংস্কৃতের মতনই উচ্চারণ হয় আর বাংলায় উচ্চারণ হয় "khetro"। মূল পরিবর্তনগুলো প্রধান আর্যভাষাগুলিতে একই রকম, শুধু তৎসমর উচ্চারণ আলাদা। তবু তাদের নিজস্ব প্রাকৃত রূপে দেখবেন যে ট্রেন্ড একই রকম। আমি যেটা বলছি সেটা হচ্ছে যে বাংলা লেখায় প্রত্যেক ব্যঞ্জন এবং স্বরবর্ণের উচ্চারণ তার সাথে মিলছে এমন সংস্কৃত অক্ষরের মতো হবে। তার মানে স্বরবর্ণগুলি সংস্কৃত বা হিন্দির মতোই উচ্চারিত হবে। আর যুক্ত এবং লুপ্ত ব্যঞ্জনগুলোও সংস্কৃতের মতো উচ্চারিত হবে। সেইটাই করে দেখতে চাই আমি।
Just a small note, as a French native phonologist; /ʁ/ in French isn't always [ʁ̞] (lowered, as an approximant). It varies a lot between dialects and idiolects, but it's usually just a regular [ʁ] next to a voiced consonant and [ʁ̥] (voiceless) next to a voiceless consonant. It's most often the approximant between vowels or at the end of words, but it can also be at the beginning of words.
As a native spanish speaker, it was like a literal oral version of the written form, and understood like 90% of it xD It sounds more close to the rest of romance languages, closer to català and occitan.
Facts and logic aside, as someone who has studied most of the intricacies of the French language and especially phonetics, I just love it. To be fair the pronunciation IS really really consistent, WAY more than English, it just isn't intuitive especially to a non-native. And it's not as simple as just knowing what letters make what sounds as there are a lot of rules that determine which sounds to make (not nearly as bad as the video I watched on Gaelic, that too was consistent but it was so many rules to keep track of at once it's super hard to just be able to pronounce words with sight reading). In other news, can any French speakers let me know if he made a typo with c'est ainsi, I was under the impression it's s3.t3~.si pardon my lack of effort getting the IPA. Basically just the second e has a nasal marker does it not?
I'm german and learned french in school. It's incomprehensible for me spoken from modern speakers. But the français aspiré, I basically understood everything even wothout seeing the transliteration. I wish they would speak like that.
I already made a 10 minute video showcasing what I think when I write over 4 years ago. Teenage me was just worse at linguistics and the production value is 0 as I made it for my friends not any bigger audiance.
@@Xnoob545 The final e actually serves a purpose in English: it lengthens the previous vowel. Compare: mad / made pin / pine secret / secrete cloth / clothes run / rune
Two nice things are: you can use context with words that sound the same and it really isn't a problem when 6 totally different words have the same sound; and also having so many dropped sounds makes it way easier to start speaking the language. When mange, manges, mange, and mangent all sound the same you can kinda ignore conjugating besides for mangez and mangeons when using spoken French, if you accidentally write manges instead of mange, nobody will know if you're just speaking it. Also a lot of ambiguity is cleared up with liaison or grammatical context. The conversation topic might tell you which of 6 words they meant for a shared pronunciation, but when il and ils are pronounced the same and then you say il est or ils sont, you can hear which il/ils they meant because the verb is different. That's a more advanced skill but it helps explain why French natives aren't just constantly confused about which word people are using, if you grow up speaking it those clues are very natural and clarify pretty much any sentence
I wouldn't mind if French either became French Aspiré OR if it updated the spelling of its words to match how they're actually pronounced. Then it'd be a much easier language to learn.
I'm a native French speaker and it was very easy to understand. As the bulk of each words are basically the same but with few added sounds, it wasn't harder than listening to someone with a foreign accent or just like having background noises. Actually, it reminds me the utility of both liason and grammatical gender (being able to easily understand even if we didn't hear 100% of it perfectly). I must admit, tho, that as a linguistics nerd, I'm kinda used to listen to samlple of what old and middle French used to sound like.
Honnestly...as a french speaker, it's definitively recognizable as french, not even bad sounding, fairfly pleasant in fact. It sounds a bit like someone with a medly of a few french accent (proncoucing the final letter and the sha sounds make it sound a lot like a Southern french accent while other time it soundsed a bit like an english accent on french) or a very begginer learning the language speaking but like I didn't have to make an effort in my head to really understand at any moment.
I lost it at "diver-seuss récompen-seuss" lol The only slight objection I still have is pronuncing "u" in "guerre" and "e" in "mangeait" because those were never pronun afaik, and that the "l'h" elision shouldn't happen anymore because "h" is now a proper consonant in all situations. But overall I'd say good job! Sounds quite fun, all the word-final schwa strongly reminds me of Southwestern French, with a bunch of random sss thrown in
I like this idea of French aspiré, however it get some sounds pronounced when they were actually not in Old/Middle French, because in Middle French some words had the same orthography so they changed their spelling to differentiate them. Some examples: pied "foot" used to be spelled pie in MF and got an extra "d" to refer to its Latin root pedem; same for doigt "finger" that used to be spelled doi and got an extra "gt" to refer to the Latin word digitus. But the best word in this category is poids "weight" that used to be spelled pois and got an extra "d" for the Latin word pondus, although poids actually comes from pensum (yes they just made a mistake when they looked for the etymology lol)
Today I learned that if all letters were pronounced in French, it would still be impossible for non-Gallo Romance language speakers to understand. As a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, I barely could get half of the words.
As a native European Portuguese speaker, with some family living in France, I can tell you, it's normal. French is the equivalent of throwing a full burger into a bowl of cereal.
This is also somewhat close to how French is sung in opera and classical music - final e's in particular are often pronounced, largely for improved diction.
Silencing so many letters has given French incredible information density that I am made aware of each time I have to slow down enormously to be understood by my anglophone friend learning French. This gives us the opportunity to speak at a pleasant speed while conveying lts of information. Compare this to Spanish for instance, where you must race your mouth and tongue to deliver information at the same rate.
Just imagine for a while that Latin "redemptionem" gave French "rançon" (pronounced /ʁɑ̃sɔ̃/ - compare English 'ransom'). Seven sounds dropped and only four remained. French isn't difficult, people just don't consider the sound changes enough.
As a french, it's too disturbing and confusing to use, because it makes the words extremely longer, so with the natural tendency of language to shorten it will eventually do again. Nice concept, and i feel the struggle of the reader ahah
@@pietajunior3437 I understand that it could make sense, but with the system of liaison and the masc-fem in french it will maybe never happen accordingly perhaps?
@@gaellelm6678 we could just write the liaison like children do : « un grand auteur » would become « un gran t’auteur » and « une grande autrice » would be « un grand autriç ». Of cours there is the problem of nasal vowels but we could just add new letters
"so with the natural tendency of language to shorten it will eventually do again." As a latvietis I reject that there is such a tendency. In all my language there is but 1 word I shorten. Bibliōtēka I pronounce as biblōtēka. And yes its a foreign word the verī ō sound is not present in our langauge and neither is an iō combination.
@@CelestinWIDMER c'est pour ça que j'ai précisé la liaison et les masculin-féminin. "Une grande actrice" is in fact entirely prononce in french, "u-ne gran-de autri-c[e]"
As someone who’s been learning French in their free time for quite a few years, who also took Spanish in high school, I actually really enjoy the fact that, for conjugation pronunciation sake, the words are basically all pronounced the same, especially when using the informal “on” instead of nous. Conjugations are just not my favorite thing (but I don’t hate them) so tbh I’m not complaining here 😅 plus I like how the language flows and sounds in modern times; tho, as a non-native speaker, it’s killer to try to understand sometimes because of the dropped endings 💀
"Houent" ?? ok fine thank you for teaching me a new french verbe, I didn't know that one. I am french but it happens to be a very specific verbe related to agricole works.
predictable: yes if you know all the intricacies intuitive: just like that card game with a 1000-page rule book your geek friend insists is easy to learn
I was worried when he was going over the rules, but the actual snippet at the end was fine. It was easily comprehensible as French, but more Italian/Spanish-sounding
Which is why Im never learning french. Spoken french and written french are de facto 2 different languages and nobody wants to learn 2 languages to be able to use 1.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 The divide isn't actually that big, especially compared to something like English. The excerpt at the end is perfectly intelligible for instance. All the tricks are important to sounding fluent, but not to understanding. And all languages have nuanced pronunciation that make it hard to speak like a native.
@@bolt7 English spoken as written is also inteligable, if you want to check check the oldest video on my chanel which I made years ago to show my classmates in school what Im thinking when I write. The problem is that if youve learned the spoken form, cos its normal to start with speach first atleast for me, you cant undersatnd the writen form. I mastered english speach at age 7 from watching cartoons, it took till age 18 till I was finally able to read and write perfectly.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714French? Japanese? English? Chinese? Clearly many people want to learn languages with a written form that's pretty much its own language.
@@siyacer Spanish is spoken differntly than writen? Would like to learn Japanese to be able to watch anime, wouldnt borther with kandži English is the most popular language in the world, people dont so much want to learn it as they have to, or did at such a young age they didnt really chose to. Never met a person who likes chinese characters.
If anyone wonder why there's always a double n or m in some words like : femme pomme personne donner chienne (chien in feminine It's because when nasalisation occurred in French, it also occurred for intervocalic -n- and -m- so in spelling they had to double the nasal consonant so that the first one was nasalised with the preceeding vowel while the other does its own sound because there's other sounds after. I think in Middle or Modern French, they denasalised it Now if someone asks about why we pronounce e like /ä/ in femme : feme > femme (intervocalic nasalisation occurred) > femme (merge of nasalised /e/ and /a/ into /ã/) > femme (denasalization)
Really great start. When I had read some texts on the website of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, I realized that Middle French likely sounded closer to modern-day Catalan than modern-day French. Some notes: [au] was likely pronounced /au/ and not as digraph /o/. This [u] was likely an orthographic reflection of lenited [l] - /au/ (cf. “al”), /sausə/ (cf. “salsa”). This is evidenced by modern [aux] being written [aulx] in Middle French: faulx, beaulx, etc., also evidenced by instances like caldo/calda > chaud/chaude, etc. Some (not all) modern instances of é and ê are remnants of scribal abbreviations of “es” - écrire for escrire, forêt for forest, etc. In Middle French, this invisible “s” was likely pronounced, but possibly lenited before becoming silent altogether. I like that you have the now-silent e pronounced as a schwa - this is how classically trained singers are taught to sing. Classically trained singers are also taught to pronounce the letter r as an alveolar flap, closer to Spanish, Italian, and Catalan. Guttural r was likely of Frankish/Germanic influence in the East. I also wonder that your thoughts are on aspirating H aspiré and leaving silent H muet. I like your system better because most (not all) H muet words still had an aspirated H at some point in history. As I ponder a « français historique » pronunciation, I think ultimately my system would have a lot of overlap with what you presented here. Great work, sir!
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L'Académie française isn't going to be happy with this.
They shall, deal with it.
*good.*
Their only task (assigned by a minister of Louis XIV) is to write a dictionary, which they do... once a century. Technically, they don't have the power to decide how we should write and speak, but, hey, traditions!
Phoque Zemm! (Yes, I know that phoque means seal. Don’t club me!
Fuck them, let them be pissed.
In other words: How I used to pronounce french when first learning it at school
Fr
How I still pronounce French because it amuses me.
When I started to learn French at the university, I also talked like that
English is the same
@kleppo-lk6ggwhat languages do you speak conversationally on a regular basis?
As a native spanish speaker, I can understand over 60-50% of french. But, I can understand over 80% of français aspiré.
yeah i always thought that if french pronounced more of the letters it would sound more like the other romance languages
I just realised that French is like a radical form of Español Chileno 😂
@@damian_madmansnest I don't think that. French is like a english + portuguese nasal vowels.
As an English speaker, I can understand 5%. No surprise there,
Edit: I should clarify written only. Spoken French I understand less than 1%
We cannot understand each other over 20% at most while speaking without having had each other's language classes.
You are high likely refering to written understanding only.
What is french aspiré btw
French is what happens when you go through the sound changes you want in a tonal language but you forget to add the tones
More like: what happens when you have a bunch of bigots deciding the spelling rules and they don't want the poor to become literate.
@user-vo9wd6tx6c highly unlikely. Limburgish is a really small language to have such an overt influence on French of all things, and some dialects of French are spoken quite far away from anywhere Limburgish is spoken.
No this is more just what languages do. They change, they lost stuff. The only reason it's particularly notable in French is because similar to English and Danish the orthography was frozen more or less in place before a number of sound changes which obscured it.
All the Romance languages have changed a lot, and many in quite complex ways, it's just that French has done so the most. It's not particular unique in that it has such losses, only in how much has in fact been lost
Now you made me wonder what tonal French would sound like.
Exactly. The degeneration of French pronunciation is mainly due to the fact that it's very old. Much older than English. Chinese languages have a similar history, originally being much richer in syllables. Chinese speakers compensated this loss with tones, and French speakers didn't. Not even pitch accent like in Japanese.
@@cielvaguethere aren't "older" languages.
I would unironically start learning french if it was pronounced like this
how come?
What about the cursed clusters involving elision + h?
That's way I am gonna learn Old French instead and speak to french people exclusively in it.
@@iamasalad9080 I've also learned polish so...
some Southern french dialects do speak like this because of italian influence
Pronouncing silent final e as a schwa just gave him a southern accent lol
I tought pronouncing every letter would make it a mess, but it's actually pretty easy to understand, it just sounds like a regional speech
Funny enough, as a southerner, to me it sounds like a northern regional language.
Rainbow dish.
Pinkie Pink.
it makes sense from german perspective
I thought the same, when the English speaker was reading it out, I understood nothing, but when the French speaker was reading, I was thinking "oh, still French but we've just gone south"
@user-vo9wd6tx6c Yeah, I'm not familiar with each of them but it gives me the same vibe, like very French-sounding but not quite.
as a french speaker, watching the first part of the video was like "wtf, this sounds very weird" but after watching the part where the french native spoke "français aspiré", this became quite clear and actually pretty pleasant to hear
Yep, and to be honest, not so different from modern French. I was expecting much more distortion.
Any change made to French can't make it worse than it already is. If French was pronounced closer to it's spelling, it would be a somewhat normal language
@@ararune3734 yes! But where would be the fun? 😋
@@jp16k92 It would be quite fun if my throat didn't bleed upon trying to speak a language
@@ararune3734haha what's a normal language ? 😅 Considering that there are 7000 languages spoken on earth, I don't think French or even English for that matter are the weirdest ones
As a French person, my first thought at 5:44 was "wait, now you can't tell it apart from the feminine version" but then I remembered that your cursed version of French re-introduced word-final schwa.
Languages that don’t have grammatical gender really confused as to the fuss
@k.r.a.k.iI live in southern France, both schwas in "grande amie" are silent in this context. The schwa can rearise in some contexts (including "grande" in isolation, [gʁɑ̃d] > [ˈgʁandə]) but we wouldn't pronounce the schwa right before or after another vowel, except maybe in poetry for meter reasons, but that wouldn't be accent-specific.
@@Niclaas1999Yeah, silent vs. aspirated H is one of the weirdest things about French. Technically both are silent, but the aspirated H still has an effect on pronunciation by preventing liaison. Meanwhile words like homme could lose their H and nothing would change, it's really just a leftover from Latin that hasn't been pronounced in over a millennium.
@k.r.a.k.i Yes indeed
I just found that in most songs the final e are mostly pronouced probably in order to sound fluently
As a french speaker, it doesn't sound as bad as I expected. If there was a regional accent like this, I wouldn't be surprised.
Ça rappelle un peu le catalan, non?
@@PeloquinDavida mi també m'hi recordava
Provençal, Occitan...?
Looking forward to the inevitable follow-up 'Français muet' where hardly any of the letters are pronounced.
That's pretty much like modern French now! I have no idea how the hell anybody understands each other in spoken speech without subtitles, the language is so plagued with homophones! I know, yeah . . . yeah, context! 😂
Pronounce only the first letter of every word. So simplify, each letter is pronounced like "hon" in current French. So, no change really, as far as I can see.
@@benpholmes yeah but what if we pushed it down further
Next step would be ''Français mime" where there are no sounds at all, only performance acts.
French if a German read it for the first time in his life
which is ironic because french are like that because of Frankish and Gaul people trying to speak Latin
A franconian german. Saxons wouldnt read anything like this.
@@Banom7a They learned latin correctly they just spoke it with their own accent which caused it to change over time differently than other latin dialects.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 that's the joke lol
ye sounds like when I was first learning French. I'm form Vienna
It really just sounds like a strong regional accent to my French ears. But the pronounced "s" at the end of plural makes French sounds very hissing, haha.
Spanish does pronounce every s sound and does sound hissing.
Sure, some dialects (like Caribbean, Andalusian, Argentinean, Chilean...) aspirate s sounds, but other accents (particularly Mexican accents) do tend to pronounce all 's' sounds making a lot of hiss sounds.
It sounds just like middle French.
Meaning those region has conservative language transition
@@TheJosman Spanish [s] sound is a little more farther in the mouth than a typical French or English one, making it less hissing. It's called the "voiceless apico-alveolar sibilant".
@@gugusalpha2411 maybe in some other dialects, but some accents do have the same s as the one in English.
Oh, hey, this is exactly how I sound when trying to read a French text.
Wait a minute, that's just how every english speaker reads french words
English & French: The spelling is historic and the modern pronunciation doesn't match.
Polish, German, Spanish, Italian etc: pronounce words how it's spelt.
Danish:.....
I think the reason Danish and not other scandinavian languages sounds weird is because Denmark has been invaded by France and whoever the ruler of France was at the timw wanted to make Danish like French.
Ø
I would say that German and Spanish words aren’t always read the same as they are spelled, but otherwise I get your point and I agree
@@thatoddshade Yeah, no. While Napoleon did exert a lot of control over Denmark, he didn't rule it, and I'm not aware of any time that any French monarch has ruled in Denmark.
That's also not enough to explain the sound changes in Danish vs Norwegian Bokmål and all the other crazy things Danish does that have absolutely no relation to anything in French.
This is a joke@@talideon
As a portuguese speaker myself, I understand barely 20% of what french people say, but this Français Aspiré made me understand like 60% of that
This is exactly how I pronounced French when I was first learning it, as someone whose native language is phonetically consistent. 💀
French is phonetically consistent. If a French native speaker comes across a new word, he/she always knows how to pronounce it.
@@ibnenkigalileo9256 Good to know, thanks!
@@ibnenkigalileo9256 it’s just that in French it’s a one way map of orthography to pronunciation, and given a particular pronunciation there could be a dozen ways to spell it and there isn’t any systemic way to know. This is an even worse problem with English since English doesn’t even map cleanly one way.
The e at the end sound just like a southerner, but the -s are crazy. Also I think qu and gu and ge was a mistake, I'd argue they are not silent, just a digraph
fair for gu since it avoids /ʒ/, but the u in qu is pretty much useless given all words with q have u right after (except the rare word-final q), not to mention exceptions like aquarium
@@truesoundchris ain't what I said :b
In college our professor was from the south of france and we didnt find out until after the midterm that our class struggled with the parisian-spoken listening portion because we had all developed not only an accent but an ear for the accent lmao
@@truesoundchrisYou mean isolated, right? Because in Spanish and Portuguese it can be just /k/ as well when combined with e and i (e.g. que, aqui, quem, querer, química, etc.)
Yeah. I think that was the biggest giveaway that he probably just thought this up without consulting very many Romance or French speakers, because that is a massive gap when it comes to being able to have the soft and hard arrangement for the g, gu, c, ç, and qu arrangements before e and i vs before the other vowels
I'm french and this actually sounds like french from a few hundreds years ago (though I say that just as an intuitive opinion)
I feel sad as a French speaker, we'd be closer to the other major Romance languages if we pronounced it this way
Thats what happens when you undo sound changes.
Its the case if you go far back to.
Latin gets reks from PIE hregs, notice how its still a g in regnant.
Really? Just think of the words "et" and "sept" which sound in Italian ("e", "sette") and in Spanish ("y", "siete") much like in French. As a consequence, one should rather drop some letters that aren't pronounced any more from the spelling instead of pronouncing them. Still, I definitely do not advocate dropping the final "s" indicating the plural or the "e" in the feminine forms!
@@WK-5775 True but most of our words have undergone so many changes that they've become barely recognizable to other Romance speakers. Verre vs vidrio, chaud vs caldo, yeux vs occhi,... Just to name a few. They're related but to an untrained eye they look like they derive from completely different roots. As for the s thing, it's even worse when you consider the plural of words in "al" (cheval) which ends in "aux" but pronounced o (chevaux/chevo), the x was never pronounced in the first place but was easier for scribal monks to write
@@oliveranderson7264 French is ok as it is, imo, and one can deduce the pronunciation of (most of) the words from their spelling - if one knows the rules. This is far better than in English, where there are more exceptions than rules, cf. the famous "ghoti".
As to the issue with the "x" in the plural, I was aware of that. One can't change the fact that the plural of "cheval" is "chevaux", so how should one spell that? "Chevo" would be completely irregular, even if there were "travo" and "matério" too. "Chevaus" would be ok, along with "châteaus" etc., if needed. But that wouldn't make things easier, after all. And the solution "à l'anglaise", writing "chevals" and pronouncing "chevaux", would mess things up completely.
That doesn't make any sense. There is no point to sound close to each other. Except to confuse every language together
he fixed it
I kind of disagree with one thing
digraph I would left as standard french /ʒ/ not /ʒə/ because is consider part of digraph so it's not silent
It's just slightly better than real French. Old French is actually not painful to hear.
The emporors name was Karle Magne not Šarle Main.
''real french'' taught in most french courses is just parisian french. This is like southern accents in france. I even had a teacher tell us that if we wanted, we could roll the R, since there's many french accents that do it.
this is not quite like old French, old French has the same heavy liaisons but some sounds are completely different, like Francais would be pronounced Franswé and you would roll the R. It's closer to the Quebecquer accent or joual.
@@St-benoit I know, he said in the video this is not like old French. Reread my comment. I said 'it', it being the version of French lingo lizard made in this video, sounds slightly better than real French. Then I said Old French is actually not painful to hear, in contrast to the previous two types of French mentioned.
And yes, I have heard Old French.
Are you aware that This Guy has a foreign accent and doesn't really Master the prononounciation of """old french" nor moderne french
Now imagine if English speakers *actually* pronounced every letter of English *as they claim* to pronounce them. Give it a try.
It’s been made in another video. Look it up!
To be fair, most of the situations you are referencing are borrowed words of French origins.
@@answerman9933 Untrue. Most words with silent k are from Old English (knee, knight), as are words with silent w (whole, sword, answer), silent t (listen, wrestle), etc.
That would be just Russian accent 🙄😅
Ten you'd get de Anglish Kniggets back!
Pretty good video but I'd just liked to say that the silent final e is still pronounced is certain accents, especially in the south of France
That is the most beautiful version of French I've ever heard... 😊🤗❤️
I think it sound worse but it is easyer to understand.
UGH YEAHHH IT LITERALLY SOUNDS WAY BETTER THAN MODERN DRENCH. But Im not even french I have french friends tho so I think I would know something about how people speak frenxg bormally
honestly this sounded more normal than i expected lol. the french do pronounce stuff in songs that wouldn't be pronounced otherwise, if it helps it fit the rhythm better, or at least they used to. made the listening sections of my french phonology exams more difficult
accidentally reinvents Old French
Don't let him reintroduce the nominative/oblique system
Please do this for English too.
Arron Alon made a couple of videos called 'What If English Were Phonetically Consistent'.
I already made a 10 minute video showcasing what I think when I write over 4 years ago. Teenage me was just worse at linguistics and the production value is 0 as I made it for my friends not any bigger audiance.
That would just be Original Pronunciation, I think.
If French was pronounced like this the closeness to Catalan would be much more evident 😍 Love it
5:24 The "d" in "poids" was introduced by mistake to make French spelling closer to Latin. "Poids" like Spanish "peso" never had a spoken "d".
It's like the "b" in "doubt", which also isn't pronounced.
@@dragonick2947 or debt, from debitus
@@dragonick2947That´s right, it was sneaked in afterwards to reassociate this word with Latin dubito. Robwords has made a video of that.
The h in huit (uict > huict) was also an artificial addition and doesn't belong there, afaik.
@@Ennocb I think it is the same thing that happened in Spanish "huevo": old typewriters would have written those words "VEVO", "ueuo", "VIT" (or "VICT"), "uit" (or "uict"), so adding an "h" makes clear that you're supposed to use the semivowel "u" sound, not a "v" sound. Otherwise, you would have pronounced them the equivalent of "vevo"/"bevo" and "vit" (or "vict") respectively
As a French speaker but in Africa sometimes we pronounce the silent letters but the e
liaison?
@@elchile336 w h a t
@@grobbelaarthibaud les [le], amis [ami], les amis [le‿zami]; est [ɛ], belle [bɛl], la fille est très belle [la fij ɛ‿tʁɛ bɛl]
[ɛ‿ʒ ʁɛzɔ̃]? (ai-je raison?)
I wonder how much shorter French texts would look like if only the pronounced letters were spelled lol
Well now I know why "mangeait" is spelt like that.
Though writing it manget would amount to the same thing, since manger is /mɑ̃ʒe/ so would be manget
I'm trying to learn to sing a medieval french song recently. This video really helps me a lot. Thanks.
This is one thing I love about French, the sounds look hard when spelt, but they simplify when pronouncing them
as an italian, if french pronounced all the letters it would be extremely easy to learn
It actually sounds like Baroque French for theatre and opera, which is good. Some remnants here and there in older versions of La Marseillaise or Edith Piaf's songs...
J'ai maintenant mal à la tete.
Omg hi Patafoin! I love your animations!
Isn't that just Old and Middle French with funky grammar and pronunciation?
As a Bengali, considering that compared to its Indo Aryan cousins, Bengali (and other Eastern Indo Aryan languages like Odia and Assamese) has gone through some extra sound changes kind of like French (although not to the same extent and also some of the other equally extreme sound changes in other Indo Aryan languages are masked by a degree of Sanskritization through tatsamas), I wonder how pronouncing all letters in Bengali worsa like their Sanskrit equivalents would make it sound to speakers of non Eastern Indo Aryan languages. Perhaps someone should try it sometime.
Holy shit it's Bengali Leonhard Euler
বাংলাতে যদি সব বর্ণ উচ্চারিত হয় তাহলে ওড়িয়া/উড়ে ভাষার কাছাকাছি শোনাবে। ওড়িয়া/উড়ে ভাষায় শব্দের শেষের 'অ'-ও উচ্চারিত হয়।
@@mottom2657 হ্যাঁ এবং না। কয়েক জিনিসে ওড়িয়া উচ্চারণ তার বানানের সাথে অবশ্যই বাংলার চেয়ে আরো মেলে, তবুও যেহেতু দুটোই পূর্ব আর্য ভাষা সেইজন্য তাদের ঐতিহাসিক ধ্বনি-পরিবর্তন মোটামুটি একই রকম। যেমন ধরুন সংস্কৃতের অনেক যুক্তব্যঞ্জন দ্বিরুক্ত হয়ে যায় শব্দের শেষে বা মাঝখানে আর শব্দের প্রথমে শুধুমাত্র একটা ব্যঞ্জন হয়ে যায়। অবশ্য এমন নয় যে হিন্দির ইতিহাসে এরকম পরিবর্তন নেই। ধরুন সংস্কৃতের "ক্ষেত্র" (kṣetra) এখন দুই ভাষাতেই "খেত/ক্ষেত" (khet) হয়েছে কিন্ত সংস্কৃতের তৎসমটি হিন্দিতে সংস্কৃতের মতনই উচ্চারণ হয় আর বাংলায় উচ্চারণ হয় "khetro"। মূল পরিবর্তনগুলো প্রধান আর্যভাষাগুলিতে একই রকম, শুধু তৎসমর উচ্চারণ আলাদা। তবু তাদের নিজস্ব প্রাকৃত রূপে দেখবেন যে ট্রেন্ড একই রকম।
আমি যেটা বলছি সেটা হচ্ছে যে বাংলা লেখায় প্রত্যেক ব্যঞ্জন এবং স্বরবর্ণের উচ্চারণ তার সাথে মিলছে এমন সংস্কৃত অক্ষরের মতো হবে। তার মানে স্বরবর্ণগুলি সংস্কৃত বা হিন্দির মতোই উচ্চারিত হবে। আর যুক্ত এবং লুপ্ত ব্যঞ্জনগুলোও সংস্কৃতের মতো উচ্চারিত হবে। সেইটাই করে দেখতে চাই আমি।
@@mottom2657 @mottom2657 হ্যাঁ এবং না। কয়েক জিনিসে ওড়িয়া উচ্চারণ তার বানানের সাথে অবশ্যই বাংলার চেয়ে আরো মেলে, তবুও যেহেতু দুটোই পূর্ব আর্য ভাষা সেইজন্য তাদের ঐতিহাসিক ধ্বনি-পরিবর্তন মোটামুটি একই রকম। যেমন ধরুন সংস্কৃতের অনেক যুক্তব্যঞ্জন দ্বিরুক্ত হয়ে যায় শব্দের শেষে বা মাঝখানে আর শব্দের প্রথমে শুধুমাত্র একটা ব্যঞ্জন হয়ে যায়। অবশ্য এমন নয় যে হিন্দির ইতিহাসে এরকম পরিবর্তন নেই। ধরুন সংস্কৃতের "ক্ষেত্র" (kṣetra) এখন দুই ভাষাতেই "খেত/ক্ষেত" (khet) হয়েছে কিন্ত সংস্কৃতের তৎসমটি হিন্দিতে সংস্কৃতের মতনই উচ্চারণ হয় আর বাংলায় উচ্চারণ হয় "khetro"। মূল পরিবর্তনগুলো প্রধান আর্যভাষাগুলিতে একই রকম, শুধু তৎসমর উচ্চারণ আলাদা। তবু তাদের নিজস্ব প্রাকৃত রূপে দেখবেন যে ট্রেন্ড একই রকম।
আমি যেটা বলছি সেটা হচ্ছে যে বাংলা লেখায় প্রত্যেক ব্যঞ্জন এবং স্বরবর্ণের উচ্চারণ তার সাথে মিলছে এমন সংস্কৃত অক্ষরের মতো হবে। তার মানে স্বরবর্ণগুলি সংস্কৃত বা হিন্দির মতোই উচ্চারিত হবে। আর যুক্ত এবং লুপ্ত ব্যঞ্জনগুলোও সংস্কৃতের মতো উচ্চারিত হবে। সেইটাই করে দেখতে চাই আমি।
@@mottom2657 yeaa odia still got da ɔ
This did lowkey not sound as different when spoken than I expected. Bon vidéo
But it does really sound like middle French pronunciation, just with a "modern" accent. Well done.
That funny for the word fils which it has 2 pronounciations deppending of the word what "fils" mean, pronounced "fis" for boy(s) and "fil" for threads
As a French person this is exactly what I expected Old French to sound like
Just a small note, as a French native phonologist; /ʁ/ in French isn't always [ʁ̞] (lowered, as an approximant). It varies a lot between dialects and idiolects, but it's usually just a regular [ʁ] next to a voiced consonant and [ʁ̥] (voiceless) next to a voiceless consonant. It's most often the approximant between vowels or at the end of words, but it can also be at the beginning of words.
As a native spanish speaker, it was like a literal oral version of the written form, and understood like 90% of it xD
It sounds more close to the rest of romance languages, closer to català and occitan.
Facts and logic aside, as someone who has studied most of the intricacies of the French language and especially phonetics, I just love it. To be fair the pronunciation IS really really consistent, WAY more than English, it just isn't intuitive especially to a non-native. And it's not as simple as just knowing what letters make what sounds as there are a lot of rules that determine which sounds to make (not nearly as bad as the video I watched on Gaelic, that too was consistent but it was so many rules to keep track of at once it's super hard to just be able to pronounce words with sight reading).
In other news, can any French speakers let me know if he made a typo with c'est ainsi, I was under the impression it's s3.t3~.si pardon my lack of effort getting the IPA. Basically just the second e has a nasal marker does it not?
I'm german and learned french in school. It's incomprehensible for me spoken from modern speakers. But the français aspiré, I basically understood everything even wothout seeing the transliteration. I wish they would speak like that.
This actually sounds so much better, although there a some pronunciation rules I would have done differently
I love how he pinches his nose whenever he says “français aspiré”
Now we need this for English lol
we have a ton of words ending in silent e, just like in French lol
such as take, bake, cake, sake, made, etc.
Aspirated English when? LOL
I already made a 10 minute video showcasing what I think when I write over 4 years ago. Teenage me was just worse at linguistics and the production value is 0 as I made it for my friends not any bigger audiance.
@@Xnoob545 The final e actually serves a purpose in English: it lengthens the previous vowel. Compare:
mad / made
pin / pine
secret / secrete
cloth / clothes
run / rune
true @@maelstrom57
It's just how my Vietnamese wife who didn't learn a word of French in the last 5 years would read my family name.
This sounds like Cajun French lol
Two nice things are: you can use context with words that sound the same and it really isn't a problem when 6 totally different words have the same sound; and also having so many dropped sounds makes it way easier to start speaking the language.
When mange, manges, mange, and mangent all sound the same you can kinda ignore conjugating besides for mangez and mangeons when using spoken French, if you accidentally write manges instead of mange, nobody will know if you're just speaking it.
Also a lot of ambiguity is cleared up with liaison or grammatical context. The conversation topic might tell you which of 6 words they meant for a shared pronunciation, but when il and ils are pronounced the same and then you say il est or ils sont, you can hear which il/ils they meant because the verb is different. That's a more advanced skill but it helps explain why French natives aren't just constantly confused about which word people are using, if you grow up speaking it those clues are very natural and clarify pretty much any sentence
I wouldn't mind if French either became French Aspiré OR if it updated the spelling of its words to match how they're actually pronounced. Then it'd be a much easier language to learn.
finally a version of french that makes sense
sounds just like a Romanian 5th grader reading French.. reading all the letters they shouldn't just to annoy the teacher.
Amazed to hear a linguist say "pronounciation".
i like this better than normal french
No way
I'm a native French speaker and it was very easy to understand. As the bulk of each words are basically the same but with few added sounds, it wasn't harder than listening to someone with a foreign accent or just like having background noises. Actually, it reminds me the utility of both liason and grammatical gender (being able to easily understand even if we didn't hear 100% of it perfectly). I must admit, tho, that as a linguistics nerd, I'm kinda used to listen to samlple of what old and middle French used to sound like.
I say this not to be a pedant, but because it seems very relevant to your subject matter: it's "pronunciation"
I made the same comment. (And it's spelled “pronunciation,” too.)
Mispronouncing pronunciation is one of my favourite genres
He also butchered the pronunciation of "butchered".
It's pronunced like that too.
Honnestly...as a french speaker, it's definitively recognizable as french, not even bad sounding, fairfly pleasant in fact. It sounds a bit like someone with a medly of a few french accent (proncoucing the final letter and the sha sounds make it sound a lot like a Southern french accent while other time it soundsed a bit like an english accent on french) or a very begginer learning the language speaking but like I didn't have to make an effort in my head to really understand at any moment.
french if it was normal
*bad
@@abarette_ thats not how you spell normal
As a French guy, I agree. It would take some getting used but it would sound really cool.
@@maelstrom57 as a french guy, you are wrong. It doens't sound cool.
@@Pandy._ C'est quoi ce commentaire de merde. J'ai pas le droit d'avoir un avis ?
It's much easier to understand than original French.
Sounded like your CCC3 submission until the sample text
Lol, I can see that
I lost it at "diver-seuss récompen-seuss" lol
The only slight objection I still have is pronuncing "u" in "guerre" and "e" in "mangeait" because those were never pronun afaik, and that the "l'h" elision shouldn't happen anymore because "h" is now a proper consonant in all situations. But overall I'd say good job! Sounds quite fun, all the word-final schwa strongly reminds me of Southwestern French, with a bunch of random sss thrown in
0:50 omelette du fromage...
Dexter moment..?
Isn’t it omelette aux fromage?
@@eddie-roo that's how it is in the show
Oh, Dexter! ❤️
I like this idea of French aspiré, however it get some sounds pronounced when they were actually not in Old/Middle French, because in Middle French some words had the same orthography so they changed their spelling to differentiate them.
Some examples: pied "foot" used to be spelled pie in MF and got an extra "d" to refer to its Latin root pedem; same for doigt "finger" that used to be spelled doi and got an extra "gt" to refer to the Latin word digitus. But the best word in this category is poids "weight" that used to be spelled pois and got an extra "d" for the Latin word pondus, although poids actually comes from pensum (yes they just made a mistake when they looked for the etymology lol)
Today I learned that if all letters were pronounced in French, it would still be impossible for non-Gallo Romance language speakers to understand. As a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, I barely could get half of the words.
As a native European Portuguese speaker, with some family living in France, I can tell you, it's normal. French is the equivalent of throwing a full burger into a bowl of cereal.
Eh, i speak spanish, and althought i don't understand 100% of it, it's more understandable than normal french
I am brazilian as well and I call this skill issue
Not surprising, as a French native speaker, I don’t understand portuguese even if all letters are being pronounced
I speak English and Spanish and it was mostly intelligible for me, but it sounded like weird Portuguese.
This is also somewhat close to how French is sung in opera and classical music - final e's in particular are often pronounced, largely for improved diction.
how about english with every letter pronounced?
Never mind that, just reverse the vowel shift and see where that gets you. :)
This is MUCH better! Now, please go to France and convince everyone to switch to your variant instead
this is actually beautiful
Silencing so many letters has given French incredible information density that I am made aware of each time I have to slow down enormously to be understood by my anglophone friend learning French. This gives us the opportunity to speak at a pleasant speed while conveying lts of information. Compare this to Spanish for instance, where you must race your mouth and tongue to deliver information at the same rate.
As a french native speaker, hearing this makes me feel some kind of visceral, existential dread. Great job!
Sometimes i start speaking to an invisible audience in a form of English pronounced as it would be if spelt with the IPA
2:46 "proNUNciation" 😅
Don't worry it took me ages to realize too lol
As an Australian, I am appreciating how you have embraced the word-final schwa. It deserves recognition as the superior word ending.
oh god, it would be SO much easier to understand spoken French this way 😭
Sounds like the child of Catalan and French!
Awesome work!!
Just imagine for a while that Latin "redemptionem" gave French "rançon" (pronounced /ʁɑ̃sɔ̃/ - compare English 'ransom'). Seven sounds dropped and only four remained. French isn't difficult, people just don't consider the sound changes enough.
And English has both "ransom" and "redemption".
@@BiglerSakura French has both "rançon" and "rédemption" too.
This is one of the videos that I live for.
As a french, it's too disturbing and confusing to use, because it makes the words extremely longer, so with the natural tendency of language to shorten it will eventually do again. Nice concept, and i feel the struggle of the reader ahah
The thing is, with shortening of the words, the spelling should also shorten.
@@pietajunior3437 I understand that it could make sense, but with the system of liaison and the masc-fem in french it will maybe never happen accordingly perhaps?
@@gaellelm6678 we could just write the liaison like children do : « un grand auteur » would become « un gran t’auteur » and « une grande autrice » would be « un grand autriç ». Of cours there is the problem of nasal vowels but we could just add new letters
"so with the natural tendency of language to shorten it will eventually do again." As a latvietis I reject that there is such a tendency. In all my language there is but 1 word I shorten. Bibliōtēka I pronounce as biblōtēka. And yes its a foreign word the verī ō sound is not present in our langauge and neither is an iō combination.
@@CelestinWIDMER c'est pour ça que j'ai précisé la liaison et les masculin-féminin. "Une grande actrice" is in fact entirely prononce in french, "u-ne gran-de autri-c[e]"
As someone who’s been learning French in their free time for quite a few years, who also took Spanish in high school, I actually really enjoy the fact that, for conjugation pronunciation sake, the words are basically all pronounced the same, especially when using the informal “on” instead of nous. Conjugations are just not my favorite thing (but I don’t hate them) so tbh I’m not complaining here 😅 plus I like how the language flows and sounds in modern times; tho, as a non-native speaker, it’s killer to try to understand sometimes because of the dropped endings 💀
7:03
En fait, on dirait juste un enregistrement du vieux français.
"Houent" ?? ok fine thank you for teaching me a new french verbe, I didn't know that one.
I am french but it happens to be a very specific verbe related to agricole works.
7:54 "box-officeaux" when pronouncing every letter still missing eaux, four letters in a row.
It's supposed to be "box-office aux" with a space inbetween, since they are two separate words. He does pronounce it before "États-Unis".
A video on Korku, the western most austroasiatic language, would be cool
Unpopular opinion: Modern French pronunciation is mostly intuitive and predictable
it ain't an opinion, it's a fact
As a french learner, I agree. It's much better than English.
Writing French on the other hand...
predictable: yes if you know all the intricacies
intuitive: just like that card game with a 1000-page rule book your geek friend insists is easy to learn
@@maelstrom57 cope
I’m a native French speaker from Québec. This is so funny to watch! Really cool idea!
As a French speaker this scares me
I was worried when he was going over the rules, but the actual snippet at the end was fine. It was easily comprehensible as French, but more Italian/Spanish-sounding
This is the gripe I have always had with the French language. Thanks to your history lesson, I finally feel at least partially justified. 🇫🇷🇺🇸😂
It would be an entirely different language.
Which is why Im never learning french. Spoken french and written french are de facto 2 different languages and nobody wants to learn 2 languages to be able to use 1.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 The divide isn't actually that big, especially compared to something like English. The excerpt at the end is perfectly intelligible for instance. All the tricks are important to sounding fluent, but not to understanding. And all languages have nuanced pronunciation that make it hard to speak like a native.
@@bolt7 English spoken as written is also inteligable, if you want to check check the oldest video on my chanel which I made years ago to show my classmates in school what Im thinking when I write.
The problem is that if youve learned the spoken form, cos its normal to start with speach first atleast for me, you cant undersatnd the writen form. I mastered english speach at age 7 from watching cartoons, it took till age 18 till I was finally able to read and write perfectly.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714French? Japanese? English? Chinese? Clearly many people want to learn languages with a written form that's pretty much its own language.
@@siyacer Spanish is spoken differntly than writen?
Would like to learn Japanese to be able to watch anime, wouldnt borther with kandži
English is the most popular language in the world, people dont so much want to learn it as they have to, or did at such a young age they didnt really chose to.
Never met a person who likes chinese characters.
Finally, a logically pronounced French
what an horrific creation (as a frenchman)
AN horrific lol
*terrific
@@arthurgabriel2625 double lol
@@_Boni_ if you can have "a university" you can have "an horrific..."
@@afj810 No you can't. It depends on the sound and not the letter. The "u" at the beginning of the word university makes the sound "j".
As an Italian speaker I find this version very satisfying.
This isn't "cursed" French, this is fixed French
If anyone wonder why there's always a double n or m in some words like :
femme
pomme
personne
donner
chienne (chien in feminine
It's because when nasalisation occurred in French, it also occurred for intervocalic -n- and -m- so in spelling they had to double the nasal consonant so that the first one was nasalised with the preceeding vowel while the other does its own sound because there's other sounds after.
I think in Middle or Modern French, they denasalised it
Now if someone asks about why we pronounce e like /ä/ in femme :
feme
> femme (intervocalic nasalisation occurred)
> femme (merge of nasalised /e/ and /a/ into /ã/)
> femme (denasalization)
In some medieval manuscrits, "femme" actually is written as "fame"
Basically old french(not really)
Really great start. When I had read some texts on the website of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, I realized that Middle French likely sounded closer to modern-day Catalan than modern-day French. Some notes:
[au] was likely pronounced /au/ and not as digraph /o/. This [u] was likely an orthographic reflection of lenited [l] - /au/ (cf. “al”), /sausə/ (cf. “salsa”). This is evidenced by modern [aux] being written [aulx] in Middle French: faulx, beaulx, etc., also evidenced by instances like caldo/calda > chaud/chaude, etc.
Some (not all) modern instances of é and ê are remnants of scribal abbreviations of “es” - écrire for escrire, forêt for forest, etc. In Middle French, this invisible “s” was likely pronounced, but possibly lenited before becoming silent altogether.
I like that you have the now-silent e pronounced as a schwa - this is how classically trained singers are taught to sing. Classically trained singers are also taught to pronounce the letter r as an alveolar flap, closer to Spanish, Italian, and Catalan. Guttural r was likely of Frankish/Germanic influence in the East.
I also wonder that your thoughts are on aspirating H aspiré and leaving silent H muet. I like your system better because most (not all) H muet words still had an aspirated H at some point in history.
As I ponder a « français historique » pronunciation, I think ultimately my system would have a lot of overlap with what you presented here.
Great work, sir!