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Comment by rjbwork | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. I greatly enjoyed the recent Jeopardy category, "BOOK TITLES EN FRANCAIS". Essentially, "What is the English name of the novel when given the French title?" I aced it. Can I speak French? Hardly. Has enough Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, and other bits of Romantic verbiage seeped into my brain seemingly via osmosis over the course of my 3.5 decades to allow me to read basic French? Surprisingly, even to me, the answer is yes.

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Many European languages are interlinked like that. I found learning a bit of Latin on top of my passable English and my native Swedish opened up romance languages to a honestly pretty crazy degree.

Knowing the simple glue-words like demonstratives, pronouns and interrogatives means I can get the gist of it in a way I couldn't before. In a strange way looking at these languages feels like looking like the close relatives of my native Swedish does (i.e. Norwegian and Danish). It's different, but in many cases I have so many of the basic pieces the rest can be inferred from context with reasonable accuracy.

Swedish brought in a big corpus of words from French though (native English, passable Swedish, school French), due to diplomatic relations in the 1700s. So, e.g.

Army: Danish hær, Norwegian hær, Swedish armé, French armée

Ice-cream: Danish is, Norwegian is, Swedish glass, French glace

Arm-chair: Danish lænestol, Norwegian lenestol, Swedish fåtölj, French fauteuil

Window: Danish vindue, Norwegian vindu, Swedish fönster, French fenêtre

(of course, a bunch of French also made its way into Danish and Norwegian as well. And the pronunciation is not always obvious either with French loanwords. I shocked my partner once while waiting at Postnord by saying out loud “Säger man kön (hard k) eller kön (soft k)?”)

Nitpick - some of the variations between Swedish and Norwegian is because Swedish and Norwegian ended up with different words from Middle Low German, i.e. the differences stem back from the Hansa period, and not as late as the French relations of the 1700s. So, "fönster", for example, didn't get picked from French, it's from Middle Low German "vinster" (which became "finster, fynster" and then "fönster" in Swedish). In this case the Middle Low German word replaced the older Swedish word (which did have the same origin as the current Danish and Norwegian words for "window"), but that replacement didn't happen in Norwegian/Danish (in other cases one or both did pick up a word from Middle Low German, but it may have been a different word because the traders in Bergen weren't the same ones which operated in Sweden).

I love a nitpick, thanks for the impromptu history lesson. I really need to read up more on the Hansa period.

> And the pronunciation is not always obvious either with French loanwords.

Or the spelling. I mean, I know how the letters are pronounced, so I can see that fåtölj is actually a good transcription, but visually it bears no resemblance whatsoever with fauteuil.

I have found that French words that ended up in English were actually quite difficult to recognise in a conversation, even though they are written exactly as in French most of the time.

I guess it’s related to the great vowel shift (but not only, even consonants are weird), but English really is weird compared to a lot of continental European languages. For example, a /r/ sounds like a /r/ in anything from Spanish to Finnish. Granted, there are differences in prononciation, but it is still not distorted beyond recognition. Nothing that comes close to the utterly bizarre prononciation of the /r/ in /iron/.

> Nothing that comes close to the utterly bizarre prononciation of the /r/ in /iron/.

Compare English "iron" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:en-us-iron.ogg

German "eiern" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:De-eiern.ogg

French "ailler" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:LL-Q150_(fra)-Lepticed7-...

None of the <r>s is anything like [r].

Maybe I just pronounce it weird, but I tend to pronounce "iron" the same way as the phrase "I earn", just with less space between them. Obviously the "r" is closer to the "n" in my pronunciation, but it feels like a stretch to say that it's the "r" with the weird pronunciation. If anything, the vowels are what seem weird to me; the "i" is long, which does not seem obvious it would be the case from the spelling alone, and the "o" is just completely silent, which is the only case of that in English I can think of off the top of my head (although I wouldn't be surprised if there are a few others).

"iron" probably underwent a process called r-metathesis after the spelling was standardized (or the spelling was based on a different dialect). If the spelling had been based on the later version, it would've been "iorn". I was going to give a lengthy explanation, but someone on StackExchange already did: https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/264662

A lot of it is also due to French pronunciation changes. There are many "french" loan words where the english version is much closer to the original french than the modern french pronunciation is -oyster for example.

Then again several of the more obviously "french" words are drifting the other way as people assume they should be pronounced like modern french - valet is a great example here where most english people now drop the final 't'

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