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Comment by jackhalford | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes "verlan" words come into general use, and then get reversed again. e.g the original french word "femme" (woman) is "meuf" in verlan, but as "meuf" has mecome mainstream some people has started to say "feumeu" which is close to "femme" but pronounced differently.

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There was a video in the late 90s of a young guy from parisian suburbs talking about how Verlan (the language of his generation) jumped the shark.

His quote was something like:

   > First we started with 'arrete ca' (stop it), 
   > then 'te-arr ac', then one guy's gonna say 'te' ..
   > surely one day it's gonna be 'et'. 
   > I swear, if someone says 'et' to me, 
   > I'll grab his collar and yell 'ARRETE CA' immediately.

I found the rare distance over its own generation priceless.

Another widely used one being “arabe” which became “rebeu” and then “beur”. Hence the “black-blanc-beur” generation of the 98 French World Cup.

It’s beur THEN rebeu but yep you got the spirit.

You'll also hear frequently "rabza" for "les arabes".

The liaison between the "s" and "a", prononced "za", is incorporated in into the next word before it is inverted.

Beur came before Rebeu...

> e.g the original french word "femme" (woman) is "meuf" in verlan, but as "meuf" has mecome mainstream some people has started to say "feumeu" which is close to "femme" but pronounced differently.

This makes me very curious -- why does the original vowel of "femme" get changed in the first inversion to "meuf"? Why does the inversion of "meuf" have an extra syllable? Is "feumme" not a possible word?

The article describes this process, but the vowel isn't changed, it's dropped, because it's now at the end of the verlanized word. Eu is added because thats the sound to add when there is no other vowel, as in a one syllable word.

While "feumme" is possible I think it would have gotten too close to the original "femme" word pronunciation-wise (which is a very common word itself), which isn't what you want when you're looking for something that differentiates your speech from others.

I think that many people don't even know that "meuf" is verlan for "femme" (or "keuf" for flic). At least, I didn't know when I was a kid. It got engrained in the language and people decided to "verlan"-ize it again. Because "meuf" ends with a consonant, you need to add an extra vowel "eu" to make the process work. You end up with "meufeu" which reverses to "feumeu".

In English we are really familiar with wildly varying vowel sounds.

Is French similar to Spanish? A change in vowel often completely changes the word and makes it incomprehensible.

Aside: if your mother tongue is English and you want to speak to a person whose native tongue is Spanish, concentrate very hard on the correct vowel sounds when speaking Spanish. Vowel fluidity is ingrained into English (especially between dialects), but vowel constancy is ingrained into Spanish (even across countries). If you are speaking English words to a Spanish listener, you can help them by speaking the words with transliterated Spanish vowel sounds from the written words. This is especially useful for the names of celebrities or place names e.g. Michael Jackson is said differently in Spanish. Also Sir Francis Drake is literally Pirate Drake in Spanish.

There's often a final "e" in French, which is then changed to "eu" after the word gets reversed (and then often truncated). Another example is "herbe" (literally "grass" but now more often used for cannabis) which becomes "beuher" then "beuh"). As the final "e" is often mute, this process is then generalized even to words where it's not there. As a widely used example, a "flic" (slang for a "cop") becomes a "keufli" then a "keuf".

Oh gosh I've been using some of these words without even realising they were shortened verlan.

I'll add the two I had to have explained to me:

chèm <- moche (ugly), not to be confused with chanmé <- méchant (bad) (think bad motherfucker), whose ending can't affort to drop.

reuch <- cher (expensive), not to be understood as an anglicism for "rush".

> chèm <- moche (ugly)

You'd write it cheum (moche => cheu-mo => cheum')

I've only ever heard is as chèm, so that's how I'd write it.

Sorry, I meant "it's written cheum"

See https://genius.com/Nekfeu-cheum-lyrics

Also "reubeu": it's "arabe" becoming "beura" in verlan, shortened to "beur", then reversed again to "reubeu".

there is also something funny: beurette, which is a feminization of beur, didn't have any particular meaning in the 90's but became very perogative in the 10's meaning a girl that want to show off but is not interesting. Oh, and it's now use without regard to race.

Putain j'aurais jamais su. Thanks HN

I knew what "keuf" meant, but never how it got constructed. I learned the word because of an MC Solaar lyric... "Qui vole un oeuf, vole un boeuf. Qui viole une meuf se fait serrer par les keufs."

"meuf" was obvious to me but "keuf" never was.

So thank you! You've answered something I was wondering about for more than 20 years now.

You're welcome. I give back to HN what HN gave to me (obscure knowledge).

In verlan you can ommit the last vowel or leave it. Most of the times it’s omitted. Here’s another example with « flic » (policeman): Flic -> keufli -> keuf Or with metro (underground): Métro -> tromé -> trom

As a French educated non-French, I must say: you've gotta love the French <3 :)

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