My francophone wife practiced saying squirrel for like 7 years before she was able to get it kinda right, so that’s very impressive if true. It doesn’t help that in my accent, it’s pronounced as one syllable. Even good approximations of the pronunciation that I’ve heard by French speakers are usually done in two syllables.

Does DE count?

It’s crazy that new expansions are still dropping, and the ranked community is thriving.

Right!? Are we just not allowed to reference certain body parts anymore? How are the Republicans at their next convention going to explain where they want the twink they hit up on Grindr where they want dat dick?

They’re just so ubiquitous in English. In my experience, people coming from the Romance languages have a very hard time with them, because most of the actions they describe are a single verb in their mother tongues. Imagine having to remember what two words mean, but then also having to remember that when you use the two words together, they form a distinct, sometimes even unrelated, meaning.

And there’s thousands.

Anus isn’t even a bad word, this is getting out of control.

Typical.

La richesse de la langue ne cesse jamais de m’étonner.

It sounds ridiculous to us, but that’s just how they talk. It also works in reverse for them; I sometimes have to remind my spouse when we’re among English speakers that she sounds like she doesn’t have enough mash potatoes in her mouth.

Pure poetry.

In French, it’s ‘le pénis,’ but nobody says that. ‘Dick,’ is feminine (la bite.)

Also, ‘vagina’ is masculine, but ‘pussy’ is feminine, because if you were to say ‘le chat’ it would mean a cat, but by feminising the word, it becomes ‘la chatte,’ meaning pussy.

As someone who grew up Anglophone, I actually find gendered languages much more precise. On the other hand, in order to make yourself understood one must have a rich vocabulary, because the definitions of words are often more narrow than in English.

And don’t even get me started on phrasal verbs… English is messy.

Exactly.

After a while, most words (with exceptions) just ‘feel’ like one gender or the other, but nobody ever thinks about it in terms of ‘sex’. I barely even think about it at all, and I’ve only been speaking French daily for a couple years at this point.

Although it still bothers me that ‘silicone’ is feminine. It’s just not logical.

Eh, French isn’t that bad, although there is some general fuckery.

If you didn’t know how to pronounce something in English before the internet, you were basically shit out of luck.

Henriette Walter. Her works on French linguistics are both fascinating and informative.

Iris Murdoch. I’ve only read The Sea, The Sea, but it’s one of the books that got me into literature when I was a teenager. I really need to get around to exploring more of her work.

I use Libristo for books in English, which are pretty hard to come by in France. They’ve been okay so far, but the delivery times are a little long for my liking. I haven’t used Amazon personally for ages, and I’ve convinced my wife to stop using them as well. I much prefer to order things from companies that are more specialised anyways; the one-stop-shop model is parasitic imo.

Ouch, I wasn’t privy to the particulars, nor am I a resident of Switzerland, merely an admirer of how things are run there (usually). I guess the people’s notions of liberty aren’t as strong there as I had thought!

Luckily, thanks to Switzerland’s direct democracy model, Proton and co. will likely garner enough signatures to challenge this with a referendum. What makes me worry is how they’ve tried to introduce this without consulting parliament.

Can confirm, she was featured in a program about Swiss naturalisation that I watched the other day. There were plenty of other candidates who were trying to integrate that were much less annoying than her, yet they still were having difficulty. It doesn’t surprise me one bit that they denied her.

Yup, can confirm. Also, if it’s past 6 pm, make sure to switch to ‘bonsoir’.

If it’s someone I know, I just say ‘salut’. It’s way more casual, and can also be used as goodbye to boot.

The saving grace with French is that when you read a word, you can (almost always) divine its pronunciation immediately. I’m not saying a reform isn’t in order, as not pronouncing half the letters in a word seems kinda stupid, but in my opinion English is several orders of magnitude worse. My spouse, who practically learned English through me while we lived in an Anglophone country for almost a decade and is quite fluent, still can’t spell worth a shit.

And even us native speakers have to guess the correct pronunciation of words we haven’t heard before, which is insane. When l was young I was a voracious reader, but having never heard many of the more uncommon words spoken before, I often internalised the wrong way of saying them.

Fuck it, I’m on board. Let’s gut this thing and start fresh.

In this case, how far do we go through? Do we basically eliminate the letter ‘c’? Do we re-add thorn and eth? So many possibilities, but I doubt we will ever see it come to fruition in our lifetimes. There are too many people who are obsessed with tradition in the world.

Fair enough, I only said that cause it was the case for me aha.