Just wait until you look into French numbers.
How different languages say 97:
🇬🇧: 90+7 (ok, there is some jank in English numbers - 13-19 are in line with the Germanic pronunciation, i.e. pronounced “right to left”, as a weird hold-over from the more Germanic Old English)
🇪🇸: 90+7
🇩🇪: 7+90
🇫🇷: 4x20+10+7
And if you think that’s bad, the Danes actually make the French look sane…
🇩🇰: 7+(-½+5)x20
Even Danes generally don’t really know why their numbers are like that, they just remember and go along with it.
You know everytime your mention French number, there is always belgian or Swiss who will tell you :
🇧🇪🇨🇭: 90+7
☝️🤓
please… french swiss…
what the actual fuck is wrong with you, denmark?
…whats not?
Cope hagen?
That’s not real. I refuse to believe that.
It is, but we just say seven and half fives these days. Everybody knows the twenty are implied…
While learning Danish I figured out that’s just the arcane incantation for the number. It’s language juju, and you just have to know that it be like it do. Yes, it’s syv og halvfems, but the reason behind it doesn’t matter anymore. The rest of the double digit numbers are a mess as well; 30 is tredive (three tens in old norse) but starting with 50 it’s this weird score (20) and half-to-score system.
When I first started learning my brain was desperately trying to make heads or tails of it and rationalize it somehow. And then I realized that was stupid, abandoned reason, and now I just utter these backwards ass numbers and we all nod and everyone is happy lol. Language is weird.
I think Finnish would be
🇫🇮: 9•10+7
Nine-tens seven
Same for Japanese
🇯🇵: 9•10+7
九(kyuu) 十(juu) 七(nana)
Also, similar to English, 20 does not follow the pattern but instead has its own word. (Still written as 2•10 though)
“Je voudrais un baguette” I once asked in a parisian boulangerie. I don’t think anyone has looked at me with the same level of disgust before as the older lady selling the breads.
“Voilà, une baguette.”, the “une” flying through me like an icicle.
“Stupid fucking foreigner thinking my bread has a dick…”
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Why does he look like someone just shoved a vacuum hose up his ass and turned on the vacuum.
I remember standing in line for crepes in Le Havre, I just had my first year of French in school and I was practicing how to order in my head, nervously repeating “un crepe avec sucre”, and killed myself over not remembering the gender of crepe. So it’s finally my turn in line and I order nervously (I am 13 years old) and they reply with “pancake with sugar, no problem” and I’m just like 😭
Somehow people not even giving you a chance to practice your language skills is awful
“Jay parlay France-says tray bee-en! Jaytude France-says pour treys anss in laycole!”
I was in Quebec, and the locals kept trying to talk to me in French. I can technically understand French, but not at those speeds. I only had to say that phrase once to anyone, and they immediately switched to English and begged me to not speak French again. If you sound like Peggy Hill attempting to speak French, then you’ve nailed this phrase.
Damn French, une crêpe and a pancake are not the same thing!
Female, and I am sure there hides a boomer joke here
Me speaking to a French guy last week -
“We’ve just been the the musée de l’automobile in Mulhouse”
“Sorry, where?”
“Mulhouse”
“Where?”
“Mulhouse”
"Aaaaaah I see! It’s pronounced [pronounces Mulhouse *exactly the same FUCKING way I just pronounced it]
😂 Happens very regularly
Just because your ears can’t hear a difference doesn’t mean that there is none. I deal with this a lot when Japanese ask me for help and can’t differentiate between certain sounds
Yeah in Japanese a few consonant sounds like ‘r’ and ‘l’ sounds or ‘h’/‘f’ or ‘s’/‘th’ or ‘z’/‘ð’ are basically heard as the same (an American ‘r’ might even sound like a weird ‘w’ to Japanese), and English has around 17 to 24 distinctive vowel sounds generally (based on quality) while Japanese has 5 plus vowel length and tones (pitch accent). As a result of the phonetic differences between the languages, it can be hard to hear or recreate the differences in sound quality (especially when it’s Japanese on the speaking/listening end, but Americans also sure have a terrible time trying to make Japanese sounds like the “n” or “r” or “ch”/“j” or “sh”/“zh” or “f” or “u”. they just perceive it as the same as the closest sounds in English)
In my experience, only God can hear the difference between Polish “dż” and “dź” / “cz” and “ć” (and the others)…
To add to what that other person said, when you grow up your brain gets used to hearing the sounds common to your accent and you can even stop hearing the difference between certain sounds when someone speaks your language with a different accent!
In Quebec french there’s a big difference between the sound of “pré” and “prè” that doesn’t exist with some of the french accents in France and they’re unable to recreate that difference and might even be unable to hear it!
“Pré” and “prè” consistently sound distinctly different in most, dare I say almost all, accents in mainland France. The difference is the same with basically all words spelled with those vowels. “Ê” also sounds like a long “è” in most words for most people. “e” also sounds like “é” when before silent letters except for “t”, and sounds like “è” when before multiple letters or before “x” or before silent “t” or if it’s the last sound except for open monosyllabic words, and it sounds special or is silent elsewhere. “-ent” is always silent too. Obviously doesn’t apply to “en/em”, also special exception for “-er/-es”.
This video wouldn’t exist with the Quebecois accent because the three words wouldn’t be considered homonyms.
The vowel sounds in “près” and “pré” are very clearly different, and the sound in “prêt” changes from “è” to “é” when in liaison because it always sounds like “è” at the end of words (and separately, in closed syllables) and always sounds like “é” in open syllables otherwise (liaison triggers a change in the syllable structure which changes the vowel here). This does not contradict what I said. You said “(pr)é” and “(pr)è” sound the same, nothing about “(pr)ê”.
No offense intended since I’m fully incapable of pronouncing tons of English words properly (fuck “squirrel” specifically), but as a Frenchman who has lived near Mulhouse for a few years and interacted with a lot of foreign students, what you said probably wasn’t close to being the exact same as that guy
If it makes you feel better, most Americans can’t pronounce squirrel either.
“Skwerl”
“Shit colored tree rat” is also an acceptable pronunciation.
What exactly does gender achieve in a language? Is English missing out on any nuance? Is it literally thinking about nouns as male or female, or is it just a weird name for the concept? Who decides gender when a new noun is made? What about borrowed words from other languages? Do you sound stupid if you speak French without using it, or are you just a language hipster?
Language, dude…
I’m not an expert. But I believe it is something to do with information redundancy.
If you mishear a word but surrounding words must match gender and number, you may reconstruct the misheard word.
As a native spanish speaker, I don’t think of the actual sexuality of objects, it’s just a characteristic of the word that should match other words in the sentence. For example the word screen (pantalla) is femenine, and the word monitor (monitor) is masculine. So when I see my monitor I don’t think of an actual female or male object. But the nouns should match adjectives gender, so if someone says “broken monitor” (monitor roto) or “broken screen” (pantalla rota) I have this kind of redundancy if I misheard a word.
But I’m not an expert of linguistics. Don’t quote me.
crying in German
Disclaimer: this is terrible advice if you are trying to actually learn the proper grammar, don’t follow it.
That being said, you can get by in everyday situations perfectly fine using “De” for anything, especially if you have a foreign accent people will forgive you.
De junge, de Mädchen, de Baby, de Tisch, de Stuhl, de Feuerzeuggas-Nachfüllkartusche. People will understand.
Due to the increased acceptance of non-conforming identities, it’s become more prevalent to either ask for pronouns, tell them to a person you meet, or have them somewhere visible in things like gameshows.
That’s quite as silly to me as this whole “what gender is this washing machine” nonsense is to English-speaking people.
Here in Finland, we don’t have gendered language. Even with third person pronouns, we usually default to “it” instead of “him/her/they”. Except for pets. They always get the proper pronoun “hän”. It’s just respectful.
So yeah, just like the English wonder why they have to learn different words for something needlessly gendered in France, I too, as a Finn, wonder why I have to learn different words for something needlessly gendered in English.
Right or wrong, calling a person “it” in English is incredibly disrespectful
We could do with something though. ‘Them’ doesn’t really cut it as it’s not clear if it’s plural or singular. ‘It’ is insulting.
If there was a good one, I’d just use it all the time for everyone. Why should gender be so important to identity? Isn’t it a regression to be so hungup on gender?
Singular “They” is literally almost as old as the word “They” itself.
People have gotten by using it for almost 700 years.
It’s not clear when you say they if you mean a person or a group. The term is for both. It’s ambiguous.
It’s not. Context provides you all the needed info in 99.9% of cases.
- “Alex is coming over after school, I haven’t seen them in forever.” Obviously means a single person.
- “There’s construction going on? When will they be done?” Honestly doesn’t matter but obviously means a group of people.
Sure, you need to provide context, but you’d need to with a pronoun anyway.
- “Where is she?” Who the heck is “she”?
- “What time is he finished with work?” Who are we talking about?…
You’re essentially looking at the words singular and plural definitions and coming up with a reason they don’t work. (Hey, another “they” and I’m sure you picked up on the fact that I’m not talking about a singular human.)
Can you even think of a situation that has ambiguity, which would actually come up in natural language?
Really easy and you know it. Of top of my head:
“Get who wrote this rubbish in here.” “I’ve message them. They are coming to the meeting now.” “You mean a team or an individual did this?”
It does depend how pedantic you want to be. I’ll dyslexic and I don’t process language like others and so I don’t like ambiguous. My default interpretation is frequently different. Human language has enough ambiguousness as it is. I’d like it reduced ideally.
“Who wrote this rubbish” is already ambiguous from the start, since it can be a singular author, or multiple. I admit they/them didn’t help resolve that ambiguity, but it isn’t the cause.
Tfw the washing machine is gender fluid
I believe women sometimes use them to aid in the release of gender fluid.
I tried this it doesn’t work :(
I don’t know about French, but in Spanish is feminine.
La Lavadora El Lavarropas
Depende la expresión mi buen hispanohablante, y de la zona.
Compadre esa expresión “el lavarropas” ¿sabe en que país es común?
claro, en mi país
Polish speaker here. We not only have gendered nouns but also verbs and adjectives.
polish speaker too, polish is weird smh
Enter German and Gendering: You can not say Programmer to address all Programmers in the room. You have to call them Programmerin und Programmer or Programmer:in or Programmende. And yes, most of these words aren’t even German but if you don’t use them you are a Grammar Nazi.
And btw, the fact that we address females with “die” does not mean we want them dead, thank you and have a good day.
Are you for real?
It is real. People have gotten mad at me for saying the 1 general (in my opinion in that case not-gendered) word instead of the slight pause and adding *innen. It’s quite difficult for non-native speakers to get used to it.
Meanwhile, in Dutch language, many female doctors, bosses, directors etc all prefer to be spoken to with the general “male” word, because they prefer to be spoken to on an equal term as their male colleagues and for the difference not to be made. Witnessing Germanic languages growing apart a tad further I guess.
Same in Spanish. We can say programadores (male gender plural form) to refer to a group of programmers, regardless of gender, as the standard says. However, in recent years it’s become common to say programadores y programadoras (male plural and female plural) or programadoras y programadores (female plural and male plural). Using only the male gender causes many people to complain, or so I’ve heard.
Is “dokter” even a male word? What’s the female version “dokterin”,“dokteres”?
Bedankt ik kende de term niet, maar blijkbaar ben ik (in Nederland) in de meerderheid
In onderzoek van het Centrum voor Leesonderzoek uit 2013 werd “dokteres” herkend door: 42 % van de Nederlanders; 85 % van de Vlamingen.[1]
It is also quite difficult for native speakers. I have nothing against the general idea, but the “:” solution is just shit. Destroys the whole flow of the language. Takes me out of a conversation/speech/whatever every time somebody uses it.
Language is a tool and is shaped and molded to be used by its bearers. You’ll get used to it and it’ll come natural to you. If it’s important to you, you’ll get there.
Btw: the slight pause you insert between the main noun and the gendered suffix is called a glottal stop. You do it without thinking about it for a bunch of words already. Consider “Spiegelei”. Notice the pause between “Spiegel” and “Ei”? Apply this same principle whenever you want to gender appropriately and you’re golden.
No one says Spiegel…Ei. if I say Kund:innen like that everyone will just hear Kundinnen.
And I also don’t think people will get used to it. When something new gets introduced into a language, the first natural thing is to adjust it to the speaking pattern. Which is not possible here as it is an explicit and intentional break of the speaking pattern. It will stay alien as it pretty much intents to stay alien.
Maybe children that are just learning to speak atm will, but current adults? Only those who want to really really convince themselves for ideological reasons.
As a German, I’m pretty sure they’re right. Look into glottal stop, it’s not really a long pause or anything. Think of the difference of the connection of “Spiegel” and “ei” in Spiegelei, and “Schreiner” and “ei” in Schreinerei. It’s this short contraction that stops airflow and then releases it again, and it’s present at the beginning of the “ei” in Spiegelei, but not in Schreinerei.
Here’s also the IPA pronunciations from Wiktionary:
Spiegelei: [ˈʃpiːɡl̩ˌʔaɪ̯]
Schreinerei: [ʃʁaɪ̯nəˈʁaɪ̯]
ʔ is the symbol for the glottal stop: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop
❤️
As a native speaker I am 100% sure they are wrong. Or 100% of the people using that are doing it are doing it wrong.
