• Droggelbecher@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    To be honest, when I’m speaking German, I pronounce it as French as I can (foh-pah), but when I’m speaking English, I pronounce it like the English speakers do (foe-pah).

    • samus12345@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

      “Foh” and “foe” both read as the same pronunciation to me. What’s the difference?

          • kemsat@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            I remember talking to these girls on discord, and they kept talking about their new fox ears, and then when they showed me, they were bunny ears on a headband. That’s when I realized they were saying faux ears.

            • MudMan@fedia.io
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              2 days ago

              I urgently need to know if you’re at the very least German, because if you’re anglophone that statement is straight up against the law.

                • MudMan@fedia.io
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                  2 days ago

                  Click through something for a social media conversation? Gross.

                  I did Google Translate that, full disclosure.

                  • Agrivar@lemmy.world
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                    2 days ago

                    What knock-off Google Translate clone did you use?

                     

                    "If it’s that urgent, you could have checked my profile.

                    Have a nice day."

                    • translation provided by Google Translate (for realsies)
              • palordrolap@fedia.io
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                2 days ago

                English here. I’m with you. I’m not sure if we stole the idea from French, but we do have a lot of spellings reflecting obsolete pronunciations like they do, if not a load of other funny orthographic habits.

                Noah Webster did try to fix things a little for the US, but his success was limited. And of course, the rest of the Anglosphere hasn’t bothered.

                (We do seem to have adopted “jail” over “gaol” though, if not a couple of others.)

                • MudMan@fedia.io
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                  2 days ago

                  I don’t know if it’s “fixable”. At this point you just acknowledge that there is very little information about pronuntiation in the spelling of English words and wait for your human brain to figure it out over time.

                  It’s a shame, because the grammar is pretty simple, but man, the semi-random relationship of noises and words is a mess.

                  Still not the weirdest thing as a non-native speaker. That’d be when native speakers have a super serious ten minute argument about which specific type of “a” is supposed to go in a word, all of them indistinguishable to my ear.

                  Then some other native speaker with a wild accent shows up, pronounces the same word in an absolutely unfathomable way and everybody just goes along with it.

                  It’s been thirty years since I started using the language, I still have no idea what’s going on there.

        • hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 days ago

          [ faux pas ]

          Pronounce both x(ks) and s. That’s how I believed it to be pronounced until 30s lmao

          I assume most people without actual knowledge of the pronunciation (ie. has only seen it on text) would pronounce it