French spelling USED to make sense! [Long Short]

[bcjmythical]

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"

[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!

[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! 😂

[cma]

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

[曉夢-lr]

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.

[radioactiveseaotter]

0:20 this is so petty on my end but he literally sounds like he’s saying /be.awə/ instead of just /bɛ̯aw/

[SebastianGarcia-qowi]

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.

[Designed]

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

[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

[pillowfromtpotreal]

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

[marcellomancini]

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

[galaxydave]

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

[gabrielcabralparentebezerr]

My man! I've always had this same exact doubt since I've started studying french in Duolingo.
It always bothered me, how in some exercises you can't phonetically differentiate some verbs in different persons or conjugations.
Thanks for the explanation!

[HandyMan]

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

[FannomacritaireSuomi]

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

[keylime]

Honestly english's historical spelling might be worse

[carltomacruz]

Let's make French make sense.

#BringBackMiddleFrench

[marcosgonzalez]

The spelling is holy in spanish, sometimes even the pronuntiation change to be coherent with the spelling

This problem is more notorious with word with J, like Jesús, Juan, José or Jamaica

In ALL the entire languages, there are few examples of exceptions, like México (that use the X from latin), Enrique and sonrisa (and its variants)

Then, every word, is read how it is spelled, that is why so hard for english speakers to emulate the natives and viceversa

[felixgaede]

Alright, even being German, I have to defend the french a little bit.

You cannot say that it doesn't make sense. Once you heard some words and looked at their spellings, it became pretty intuitive and honestly, I find French easier to pronounce than Spanish (mostly just due to me having a hard time rolling the r without sounding like I'm trying to imitate a dinosaur or Adolf). The only actual problem that I see with the spelling is that there are a lot of letters that do not necessarily have to do a lot on their own with the end product sound, but once you have these letter configurations memorised, it is rather easy. And as I said already, you just have to look at some words and listen to how they are pronounced and after a couple of words you kinda get the grasp of it already. And at least it is pretty consistent, unlike English. I'm just gonna say: through, though, throughout, tough... The only thing that irritated me a bit at first was that verbs are a bit of their own thing when it comes to how to pronounce them, but once you understand that you cannot quite apply the rules on how to pronounce conjugated verbs to the rest of the language, you should again have no problem at all at guessing what a word should sound like.

[tony]

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